Tuesday, October 23, 2012

#edtech Phone-Casting No Longer a Cinch

This past Saturday, October 20th, was a sad day for me as cinch.fm, one of my favorite phone-casting services, went dark for good.  I had been using cinch (formerly cinchcast and a spin-off of blogtalkradio) since early 2009 as a way to keep my students and parents updated on class happenings.  I would wear a bluetooth headset on my drive home from work and call in to record a brief message, which then automatically posted to a widget on my class website and to the class Edmodo stream via the rss feed.  I've attached an example in case you want to listen.

 In addition, on a personal note, I would sometimes record my two children if I wanted to capture them laughing or reading or just enjoying life.  I would call in, enable the speaker phone and set it down near them to record without them even knowing. Thankfully, I was able to download all of the audio from cinch to iTunes before they shut it down Saturday.

As an alternative to cinch I now use ipadio which offers live phone-casting.  It offers more features the Cinch ever did, the main one being audio transcription.  

Anyway, thanks for a few good years cinch.  It was fun to be on the cutting edge of educational technology together....

 

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