(Originally posted on the Columbia LRC Blog)
Welcome to the first post in our new “Free Technology” blog series. In this series we will look at some of the best free technologies out there and how you might use these tools to teach or study languages. In today’s post we will look at Transcriber and Audacity, two tools that help with transcribing interviews from audio files.
A word about “free”
Before we look at the tools it is worth mentioning what kind of “Free Technology” you can expect in this series. There are many definitions of the word “free” and in education you run into different ones all the time. There are the services that are “free” until you start using them regularly, those that are free to you as a teacher but charge money of your students and colleagues at other institutions, and there are all those services online that are free as long as you let them follow you while you teach or track your students as they learn.
This series is about a different kind of free, “free” as in “freedom”. We will be looking at technology built by free and open source communities and meant to be shared. These are tools with no up-sell, no hidden fees, and no registrations required, the kind of tools you can give to your students with confidence. Audacity and Transcriber are great examples of such tools.
