iPhone & Google for Assessing Student Recordings (Updated)

Last term, one of the tests I used to assess my speaking classes was to have my students record conversations in pairs. I find it nearly impossible to give accurate assessment while listening live to a conversation, so I find recording for future listening to be essential to the process. In addition, I find that when I am physically near the students, they tend to look at me for help or reassurance, which artificially affects the performance.

While there are many ways to record students, I decided to use the iTalk iPhone app from Griffin to record the conversations. After transferring the recordings over to iTunes on my MacBook Pro, I placed the files in a playlist and synced the playlist to my iPhone.

I used Google Docs to set up spreadsheets with the student roster and made categories for assessment. Then, while on my way to school and back (I have a long commute), I used the Google Mobile iPhone app to access the spreadsheets. The beauty of this system is that I could assess student recording while standing on a crowded train with one hand holding the train ring, the other hand punching (actually, touching) numbers into the spreadsheet and using the remote control when a pause or rewind is needed.

Unfortunately, the Google Mobile iPhone/iPad app does not (as of this post) allow the creation of new docs and has limited ability other than input.

An alternative approach with the iPad is to use Apple's iPhone Numbers app which has compatibility with Apple's iWork Numbers app on Macs. Among the advantages is the greater flexibility and functionality of Numbers. However, there is no Numbers app for the iPhone and I find the compatibility and ease of synchronicity between devices to be desirable. Hopefully Apple and/or Google will address these issues or another party will introduce a solution.

Any thoughts, questions or comments? Have a better solution? Please leave a comment.


*Updated 11/19/2010

Google announced yesterday that it was rolling out new editing functionality for mobile devices. When I looked yesterday, I still did not have it on my iPhone or iPad. This morning when I woke up I had it on both devices. The capabilities are still limited (no formatting for documents), but you can now edit text and you can now created spreadsheets and documents on your mobile device. Nice!