'Telephone' photo (c) 2009, plenty.r. - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Though I’ve made some updates here, you probably also want to check out The Best Sites For Beginning iPhone Users Like Me.

There are a number of excellent sites that English Language Learners can use to practice their English, and you can find many of them at The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English.

Most of them, however, require using a microphone, which is fine for when we’re in the computer lab at school, and fine for the minority of my students who have Internet access at home, but not very helpful for those without that kind of access. That makes using the computer for speaking homework not really an option.

There are other apps, like Google Voice, that allow people to record audio by phone, but require some work by the teacher to post the audio on the web (admittedly, not much work, but I’m always looking for ways to reduce my workload, not increase it :))

So I decided to create another “The Best…” list, and this time focus on free applications that would allow students to use a phone to record audio directly to the web — without me having to be an intermediary. I was looking for sites that would allow me to just listen and leave comments, but not require me to actually post it.  It would serve as an “audio journal” for students.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Students To Record Audio By Phone:

(Several that I had listed when I originally posted have gone out of business)

Tumblr Now Lets You Dial A Toll-Free Number To Post Audio To Your Blog is a TechCrunch post.

I just learned about ipadio from Cliff Mims today.

Audioboo

Please let me know if you have other suggestions.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.