Synth is a free service that was designed for classroom use. It has had some significant updates in 2021. Originally, Synth limited recordings to 256 seconds. Now you can record for up to 30 minutes. As before you can post your recordings for students to listen to and respond to with recordings of their own. Likewise, students can create a recording, post it, and get responses from you and their classmates. A video overview of Synth is available here.

Anchor is a simple and free platform for recording, editing, and distributing podcasts. Recording on Anchor can be as simple as just holding down the record button on your phone or on your laptop and then releasing it when you’re done talking. Anchor lets you upload external audio files to include in your podcast. Finally, if you want to distribute your podcast to Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Google Podcasts, Spotify (Anchor’s parent company) or any other large podcast networks, Anchor simplifies that process for you. Watch the video here to learn how to publish a podcast through Anchor.

Flipgrid made its name as a service for teachers and students to use to record and share short videos with each other. But there were some teachers and students who preferred not to appear on camera. To remedy that, for a few years I would recommend that people just cover the webcam when recording. But now Flipgrid has an audio-only recording option. You’ll find that option in the “options” menu that appears when you launch the recorder that is built into Flipgrid. See the screenshot below to locate the audio-only option in Flipgrid.