Responding to Student Papers with Audio

Over the years, I have intermittently used audio to comment on student writing. I have used it in both face-to-face and in online classes. The students seem to like it, and there seems to be substantial research that supports the benefits of this way of responding, as opposed to scribbling notes on the margins, or even typing on a draft. The main benefit, according to this research, seems to be that student writers tend to see such aural feedback as more "holistic." They look for a "general impression" about their writing on the part of the instructor rather than getting stuck on mistakes and comments on writing's minutiae. Of course, there are stages in the writing process when you _are_ looking for them to pay attention to those minutiae, but not always. On the instructor's end, audio comments allow for more extensive and detailed feedback than typing or writing by hand would typically allow.

But how to do it technically? In the past, I have used drop.io, which is a free service which allows you to uploads large media files and then send the link to a an e-mail address. That worked file but I felt like the process of responding and sending the mp3 file links was sort of separate from the process of reading and seeing the paper online.

This time, I have been experimenting with Riffly, a Drupal module which allow to embed audio and video content into Drupal posts. I think I am going to respond to the next batch of student papers using Riffly right there, on my Drupal-powered class site. I am sticking with audio for this one, so no talking heads.