Freeform Sound Board

I teach a few classes and lessons through the online synchronous modality and have found the use of my Stream Deck very handy for many tasks, one of them being a sound board.

When students answer a question correctly, the receive a random positive sound effect that reinforces their response and encourages others to respond as well. Likewise, incorrect responses receive a humorous selection of negative sounds or phrases, again keeping everything light and encouraging participation. Additionally, I like to use the sounds of crickets or snoring when students aren't responding to questions in a timely manner.


I have often thought it would be handy to have a sound board like this in my face-to-face courses and have instinctively reached for the sound board that I do not have at certain points in my classes.

Now, thanks to Freeform, I have created my own. Yes, this resource could have also been created with any of the iWork applications, but brainstorming innovative methods of incorporating Freeflow into my workflow spurred this idea.

I am unable to share the Freeform document in its interactive state, but I hope that by sharing the story and a short video, you might also be inspired to create and use your own sound board in classes. I simply used the "Insert from..." option to select all these sound effects that I had placed in one folder. A little time adding some shapes and tidying up the placement and voila!

All sound clips were either composed/created by me or were downloaded from https://pixabay.com/.

 


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8 replies

March 15, 2023

I do like the descriptive boxes that automatically accompany the audio files when imported into Freeform as compared to the small circular speaker icons used in iWork applications, saving the author from having to create a shape and label to accompany the file.

March 15, 2023

Really fantastic and creative use of Freeform - thanks for the idea and demo!

March 19, 2023

And…it syncs across all devices! Make the soundboard on one device and it’s always with you -iPad, iPhone, Mac! Awesome!

(Sorry but just opened it on my iPhone and was amazed that it functioned perfectly.) 😎

March 20, 2023

Never thought that you could add sounds like this to Freeform! Very cool idea!

March 20, 2023

It would be nice (feature request maybe?) to be able to record directly into Freeform, but for now we can be happy to record with Voice Memos, saving the file, and importing into Freeform. It’s so fun to trigger these sounds in class through my bluetooth speaker. I’m planning an activity that will allow the students to trigger audio responses through the sound board to questions through their iPads. That could be fun and disruptive! 😆

March 24, 2023

What a neat idea for using Freeform! Thanks for the demo video, Donald.

March 26, 2023

What a clever idea! Thanks so much for sharing!

October 31, 2023

WOW! Love this idea! Thank you for sharing!!!

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