Whether for convenience, accuracy, accessibility, or a combination of the three there are times when having the option to quickly record audio can be handy. Here are five iPad apps that students can use to quickly create short audio recordings.
inClass is a fantastic free iPad app that students can use to take and keep track of the notes they record in all of their courses. inClass allows students to organize notebooks for each of their courses. Within each notebook students can include typed notes, audio notes, video notes, and pictures. The ability to store those four types of notes makes inClass a great app for students to use in a science lab where they might want to have a little video clip of an experiment along with their own typed notes about the lab experiment.
Super Note is another free iPad app that students can use to record audio notes in the same digital notebooks that they type their notes into. One of the nice features of the Super Note recorder is that you can pause your recording and start it again without having to create a separate audio file. In other words, a student could start a recording in the morning, pause it for a lunch break, then come back and continue the same recording in the afternoon. Super Note offers convenient tools for color coding notes and sorting notes chronologically and alphabetically.
SoundCloud is the audio recording app that I demonstrate more than any other. SoundCloud’s free iPad app allows you to record up to two hours of speech for free. Each recording is automatically uploaded to your online SoundCloud account where you can share it with others. SoundCloud recordings made on the iPad can be trimmed to remove dead air or mistakes before being uploaded to an online account.
Recordium is an iPad app for creating audio recordings. Like Sound Cloud, Recordium can be used to quickly create a spoken note or to record someone playing an instrument. Recordium can be used to trim the end or beginning of a recording. You can also snip out a middle portion of a recording and save it as a separate recording or trash it. Where Recordium gets interesting is in the annotation features. The app allows you to highlight and tag portions of your recordings. Your tags can even include pictures. Completed recordings can be shared to a number of services including Google Drive and Evernote.
Evernote for iPad includes the option to make an audio recording. To make a recording just tap the “new note” icon then tap the microphone icon to start your recording. Recordings cannot be edited in the Evernote app, but you could download them and edit them in another app. Of course, your audio notes in Evernote can be saved in any of your Evernote notebooks.
