Improve Your Students' Listening and Speaking Skills with SmallTalk

SmallTalk has to be one of the easiest ways of creating and sharing audio and voice communications with your students.

It’s a simple plugin for the Chrome browser that allows you to record directly into your Gmail messages. Simply open a new message and click on the icon in the bottom right. Click the tick when you have finished speaking and then just send the message off to your students.

Students who receive the message don’t have to be Gmail users. They receive your email message with a link to the audio file that they can play directly from the message or they can download and play the message.

This is a really simple way to create audio that can be used for a wide range of activities.

• You can record a dictation text for students to listen to and write down. You could then get them to record it and send it back.
• You can send students audio notes from your lesson. This could be a summary of new vocabulary and include models of pronunciation, or could be models of example sentences or language chunks students have been working on.
• Alternatively you could use it for communication and get students recording learning journal entries that you can respond to.
• If students have access to Gmail and can use the recording tool themselves you could start a Q and A session with them to get them asking and answering questions.
• Instead of sending students written comments about their homework you could send them an audio file for them to listen to.

SmallTalk is a really simple to use free tool that can save you time and enhance your teaching and students’ learning.

You can find 100 + more tools and resources like this in my ebook Digital Tools for Teachers - Second Edition or if you want to train other teachers to use these kinds of tools check out the Teacher Trainers’ Edition.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey