Laura just posted a thought-provoking note about reviewing student papers. It reminded me a bit of my recent postings on responding to metas in my principles course and papers in my first year seminar. But Laura takes it a step further, giving audio feedback using audacity. And she subsequently conferences with the students via IM. Very cool! I’ve been meaning to explore audacity, but haven’t found the time yet. (Question for the tech folks: What type of microphone is necessary to do this? If I wanted to try this out, do you have one I could borrow?) I’ve held virtual office hours with IM, but never a conference per se. Back when I used to conference regularly with all my students, it often seemed a waste of time. Now I tend to do it only with students who request it. Laura suggests that IM might be a better medium for this. Sounds like both of these ideas are worth exploring.
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I used my built-in laptop mic for this. But you can use an inexpensive mic as well. I’ve used logitechs with pretty good success.
You could also audio/text conference using Skype, Yahoo, or AIM, all of which allow voice and text chat. [If you had an electronic version of the paper (with your digital ink or MS Word comments), you could even send them the paper via one of those services at the start of the conference so you could both be looking over the annotated paper together.]
Also, Laura’s right. If your laptop mic doesn’t work well enough, you can use a logitech headset with Audacity. [Feel free to borrow mine to see if that does the trick.]