Web-based tools: Audioboo and Sync.in

Technology has become an important part of our lives. Learners use technology everyday as part of their lives, yet education in general, and second language (L2) teaching in particular sometimes chooses to ignore the new trends and impose the old approaches. It has been argued that “technological literacy is an essential component of the language acquisition strategic toolbox” (Robin, 2007:109). Teachers are able to effectively increase and diverse their input by means of unlimited resources such as podcasts, videos, captions, dictionaries, etc…

It has been suggested that the three main reasons for using technology in L2-teaching are motivation, interactivity and feedback (Sharma and Barret, 2007). Moreover, these tools can contribute to make learners considerably more autonomous, it saves some crucial time and money and it brings current, up-to-date materials to the classroom.

However, as Norman (2004 cited in Rost, 2007:102) points out, for a new technology to be used effectively in the classroom it must be “intuitively helpful and elegantly efficient”. In other words, it is crucial that it help us improve teaching standards. In addition, teachers need to take into account every learner and their different needs, therefore it has been observed that applying “blended learning” (Sharma and Barrett, 2007), a mixture of different styles of learning, may be desirable.

This essay will examine two web based tools: http://audioboo.fm/ and http://sync.in/. Firstly it will outline what the tools can do in basic terms. Then this essay will explain how to use Audioboo and Sync.in within a learning environment and how it would benefit students of L2.

Audioboo.fm

Figure 1: Audioboo.fm

Audioboo is a very useful and easy-to-use...

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