About two months ago I started playing with the Nanogong Module for Moodle.  Nanogong is a part of the Gong Project and is a Java based audio recorder that integrates with Moodle. It worked OK in 1.8 but when I upgraded to 1.9 everything went south.  Over the last few weeks the developers, the "Hong Kong University of Science and Technology", have done a lot of work on the module and just recently made the module Open Source.  I upgraded to version 3.1 last night and things seem to be working quite well now.

So what is the Nanogong Module? It is a voice recording module that allows Moodle users to record their voices directly into a web page.  During recording and playback each user can speed up and slow down the audio.  The voice quality is excellent and provides a wonderful platform for use with language students. Nanogong has three components within Moodle, the module itself that provides an activity similar to an assignment where each student is asked to read some text in a description box and then to record that text in the chosen language.  Once the recordings are uploaded into Moodle the teacher can listen to them and then leave text comments for the student regarding their effort.  The other components in nanogong are a filter that will automatically trigger the player when the nanogong file type is found and a modification to the html editor that allows recordings to occur on any page that uses the html editor.  With the html editor modifications the teacher can not only leave text comments for students but can now leave audio comments.

Yesterday I did a training session on the Nanogong module with about a dozen teachers, most of the language teachers.  The response to the training was just fabulous.  The teachers were incredibly excited about the ability to have students record their own voices at home and then they could also listen to the recordings at home as well.  It will really give teachers the opportunity to listen more to all of their language students. The html editor addition was also a big hit.  The idea of audio based forums for asynchronous communications with students from other countries was probably one of the most popular concepts.  The training was so successful that at 7:00 PM last night I received an email from a teacher that was working on building Nanogong activities and was having a problem.  When I asked her if she was at home or at school she told me that she was sitting in her car in front of the school using the schools wireless connection to work on her Nanogong activities.  She had come up to the school to run and was so excited that she worked on Nanogong instead.  That is just totally awesome!  At this point, I would highly recommend this module to anybody that wants to record directly into Moodle.  The recorder looks like the image below:

 

My focus on much of the training this summer has been on World Language instruction.  Along with the Nanogong module, over the last two days I have taught two classes on creating podcasts with Audacity and then using one of the Moodle podcast modules to provide the rss feeds.  I also taught a class on how to use Skype to communicate with people real time all over the world (yes we allow Skype to run on our network).  These three tools have created such a stir with our language teachers that I can't remember the last time I saw this kind of excitement in language teachers.  I am looking forward to working with them throughout the year and spotlighting what they are doing with the school board.