Cinch In The Classroom

Cinch In The Classroom: "

Early Adopter of Cinch, 7th grade teacher Justin Talmadge, known on Cinch as Mr Talmadge, participated in an interview with me this week. We were very excited to see a teacher using Cinch in the classroom. He was at the top of our list when deciding who we would include in a new series of Who’s Who on Cinch. Read on and see how an educator is bringing web tools into the classroom.

Name – Justin Talmadge

Occupation – Teacher

What country do you live in - USA

How did you find Cinch? I found Cinch by chance when I was searching for ways to embed an mp3 player on my class blog (www.mrtalmadge.com). In my search I happened upon BlogTalkRadio and discovered Cinch from the BlogTalkRadio website.

What prompted you to use Cinch? I was looking for a cheap and easy way to upload audio to my class website using my phone. I had been using Gcast, but they decided to charge $100.00 to use the upload by phone service. I knew there had to be other services out there, so I began looking around online.

Are you still using it for its original intended use or has your use expanded? I only use Cinch for the upload by phone aspect. I have embedded an flash mp3 player on my class blog as well as provided an icon to the rss feed of my cinches

What have you found to be the best benefit of using Cinch? The best part is that it doesn’t cost me anything. Plus, it’s so simple. As I am driving home from school in the afternoon, I simply put on my hands free device and call the Cinch number programmed into my Blackberry. I then record what we did in class that day so students or parents can hear straight from the “horse’s mouth” what went on in class. For students and parents, I have burned the feed using Feedburner and they can subscribe by email if they want.

How do you see people using Cinch in the future in your occupation? I think this could be an easy way for teachers to communicate with their students, but also for administrators to communicate with parents. Rather than the expensive call out services that are used routinely by many districts, why not simply record to a central location and let the rss feed perform it’s magic from there. If one wanted to really get revolutionary, why not sign students up for an account and they can record their own cinches reflecting on the learning they have done in class. I as a teacher could subscribe to each of their rss feeds.

What would you like to see for Cinch in the future? I don’t know if this is possible, but it would be cool if users could select from a menu of public domain or creative commons licensed background music that could play when users click on their cinch.

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