Sep
30

Chinswing

Filed Under (Tools) by teachingsagittarian on 30-09-2007 and tagged , ,



After perusing through the forum threads in the Classroom2.0 ning I stumbled across this little application called Chinswing, recommended by Sharon Betts.  At first look, it’s very similar to voicethread but without the images. Chinswing uses channels.

“All discussions are categorised into various topical “channels”. For example, there is a Movies channel, and a Small Business channel. It is inside these channels that the multi-user discussions exist. Each discussion is made up of voice messages, recorded by Chinswing users.

There are two types of pages at the heart of Chinswing. Channel pages list all the discussions that exist in a particular channel, and offer ways to narrow your search and enhance browsing. Discussion pages show a visual representation of a particular audio discussion, and offer ways to navigate through the list of contributors and discussion history. This is where you listen to the discussion.”

What’s different about Chinswing is that you can RSS it.  This is how you can follow evolving conversations.

To stay up to date with any particular discussion, you have two choices:

1. Listen on the website, by simply returning to (or bookmarking) the discussion that you wish to follow, and seeing what’s new.

2. Keep a “watchlist”, and optionally receive email notifications. You can keep a personal “watchlist” of discussions that you want to monitor by clicking the “Add to Watchlist” button found on every discussion page. This watchlist will be visible on your user profile page (when you’re logged in). You can then receive email notifications whenever someone adds a message to any of those discussions.

3. Subscribe using the RSS/Podcast feed link. By using RSS reader/aggregator or podcast receiver software, you can be automatically alerted when someone adds a message to that particular discussion. This method is for more advanced users.

Using podcast receiver software, you can have any new messages automatically transferred to your mp3 player for listening on-the-go!  iTunes/iPod users should use the one-click “Add to iTunes” link.

Now that’s clever.

image citations: http://www.chinswing.com/pages/firststeps.aspx?signedup=bc9bc43a-6d9e-43f5-bd95-daeb99c8dc9b

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