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Audio for forums

For a while I have been looking for technology that would enable me to facilitate online forums but also use voice to do so.

I have found that audio recordings go well as compared with a text-based approach. And the timeliness of a forum means that replies take a while and often one will have shifted on to the next topic before everyone has had a chance to gather their thoughts and put up a post.

Enter a new class of mobile apps for audio recording and posting.

• Anchor
• Unmute
• ZCast
• Voxer

Anchor

This is a good tool to facilitate conversations as recordings and posting and playback are asynchronous. The process is painless.

But they posts all appear to be public, and the pulling together of various commenters appears to be an issue.

Long term storage is not available, and it seems that ‘streams’ are only available for 24 hours - not long enough for a class to retain for weekly purposes or for later revision.

Unmute

This is more of an app to support ‘live conversation’ than recording and pulling parts together.

ZCast

https://zcast.co/

• https://about.zcast.co/
• http://www.adweek.com/digital/the-periscope-of-podcasting-zcast-launches-on-ios/

Voxer

http://voxer.com/

They have a number of education users:

• http://blog.voxer.com/tag/education/
• http://midcareer.gse.upenn.edu/eduvoxers
• http://www.educationworld.com/a_news/educator-explains-why-voxer-strengthens-teaching-1680276396
• https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/bright-ideas-voxer/
• https://www.edutopia.org/blog/voxer-versatility-new-ways-to-communicate-brian-sztabnik
• http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2014/06/voxer_i_get_it_now.html