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(Stock photo from the TTS site)

(Actual unit)

I bought one of these a while ago to try it out (I chose a black one because it seemed more age-appropriate to my pupils than a yellow one).  I haven’t used it much because on the occasions I got it out, pupils were self conscious and refused to use it.  I’d tried having pupils record notes, results and other work during experiments without success.

This week I had my year 11 GCSE group revising work on drugs.  I gave them a series of letters from a range of addicts, and they had the role of Agony Aunt Mavis, to write scientific answers (including facts on addiction) to these problems.

Pupils rose well to the challenge and created some excellent responses.  I asked them to use the voice recorder to record their letters – and we got an opportunity to use this hardware properly.

Pupils found the Easi-speak easy to use, being able to record and play back conversations independently.  The only problem we ran into was the delay between pressing the record button and the unit starting recording.  This meant that one of the groups kept missing the start of their work, even though they were told to wait for the flashing light (stand-by) to change to a red light (recording).

Extracting the recordings was easy, plug the Easi-speak into a PC and wait until drivers are installed (built into XP, Vista and Windows 7).  Then the computer sees the Easi-speak in the same way that it would a USB flash drive, simply drag and drop the files off.

We used Windows Movie Maker to add the audio files to some still images (matching the ones on the worksheet), put titles and credits on and the film was finished ready to go on the school TV system.

I was pleased with the ease of use of the Easi-speak, and the files it created were in a format that can be used by a wide range of software.  Although a little pricier than some voice recorders, I can recommend this product for use with children with SEN (assuming you can get them to speak!)