Soundcloud

Link: https://soundcloud.com/

Tool’s Description: Soundcloud is the one of the largest open audio platforms that is powered by a community of creators, listeners, and curators. Users can submit and share audio recordings or they can listen to existing music that has been uploaded to the platform. This is beneficial for students during study sessions and for increasing their focus during classroom activities. Soundcloud encourages podcasts for users to share their points of view either in a group or alone.

Educational Benefits: For students who are auditory learners, a multimedia platform such as Soundcloud can be a useful tool for them due to dependency on voice. During listening sessions, students benefit from hearing the pronunciation of words and their syllables. Playback can be utilized as needed until proper pronunciation has been achieved (Gunter, 2010). Kinesthetic learning styles can be targeted as well for those students who need to move around more. Kinesthetic students can use headphones and/or earbuds to listen while incorporating necessary movement.

Differentiation: Applying differentiation with Soundcloud requires teachers to offer several recordings. Students experiencing a deficit by one grade-level or more in vocabulary struggle with understanding new terms. Students benefit when teachers record explanations of synonyms/antonyms, give verbal explanations, examples, and slowly repeat words for emphasis.

ISTE Standards: Soundcloud addresses the ISTE-S Empowered Learner standard by “using technology to seek feedback to improve their own practice” (ISTE-S, 2016). When confusion occurs, students can use digital tools such as Soundcloud in showing evidence of their learning from teacher-created resources such as podcasts about a skill or topic. Listening to a teacher use the required terms they improve by listening to vocabulary words being used in the proper context. Audiobooks are a great option for students to gain experience with listening to and for inflections, intonations, fluency, punctuation, and pronunciation.

Considerations: Soundcloud account setup is free however, if teachers desire more storage and better quality for their recordings, an upgrade is required. An important thing to remember is that community podcasts and music are not always filtered for language and subject matter. To avoid this and for student security, teachers may want to share their previewed files through their digital classroom.