Chirbit- Not just for Furbies

I really think that Chirbit sounds like something that Furbies used to say. "Ooo wahhh heeee Chirbit Ahahahhaha." Or maybe just my Furby said that...along with turning on and talking at 3am.

Anyway, I was stumped on what audio sharing program to examine since there are tons of them out there on the web. I knew how to do podcasts using audacity (or at least I used to- it's been awhile), so I wanted to try something a little different and something that could go along with my need for instant gratification. In reading through my classmates' blogs, I came across Karyn's blog entry about Chirbit. I'll admit, I was intrigued because of the name (judge a book by a cover much?) but what I liked was that it could be linked to facebook and twitter, according to Karyn's entry.

Since I had nothing to do during office hours yesterday (a normal occurence for an online instructor), I started a Chirbit account and played around with it. It was very easy to setup, and although I'm not a huge Twitter fan, it has a similar layout to Twitter, so it was at least familiar ground.

Within seconds of setting up my account, I was using the text to Chirbit program. Yes, you can make Chirbit swear, but I deleted those audio clips since my Chirbit is family-friendly (or is now). The text to Chirbit made me very happy since this would allow me to type up announcements for my classes and copy and paste them on Chirbit. I've been trying to keep a professional twitter account going for my students who want to check on what I'm grading that day or announcements, but the tweets didn't really seem all that different from just posting an announcement. Now, with Chirbit, I could get the RSS feed going into the class and they could click on whatever Chirbit they wanted to hear. Lots of possibility there!

As I'm writing this, I realize I have a ton of windows open. I have a youtube video uploading in one window, two tabs open for the Web 2.0 class, one for my blog, one for Chirbit, two email windows open, and my main class page at VGCC. It's no wonder I have the attention span of a flea.