PLS Teacher Blog 11 – Megan

‘The Trials and Tribulations of Narrated PowerPoints’

Like most people, I hate the sound of my own voice. Even worse, I hate listening back to a voice note of my own voice. Apparently, so many people hate the sound of their own voice that there is now a name for it- voice confrontation. I read somewhere online that our voice actually sounds more high pitched than it does for us usually because of bone conduction and that’s why we hate hearing our voice in recordings; because it doesn’t sound how we expected it to sound.

My own self-hatred for my voice had never really been an issue throughout my life, there weren’t many situations I was faced with when I would have to listen to my own voice constantly. However, pretty recently it has become more prevalent. With Lockdown 3.0 (the worst trilogy ever invented), my school have moved to remote learning. More specifically, creating lessons with Microsoft PowerPoint and recording narrations for the students to listen to. As you can imagine, this has been a gruelling process. Usually, for a 2 hour lesson it would take me around 3 or 4 hours to plan the lesson, produce the resources and finalise everything. On top of that, I now have to record my own voice whilst teaching the lesson.

You would think that recording your voice for a lesson wouldn’t take too long just flipping through the slides. But, you would be wrong if you thought that.

Recording my own voices adds a painstaking extra 2 hours onto the whole process, not because it actually takes that long. No, this is where my voice confrontation comes into play and ruins my life (probably an over exaggeration but I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t dramatic). I have had to re-record my voice several times just for one slide. The first time the tone of my voice didn’t sound too right, the second time I didn’t think I sounded like a teacher, and the third time I just ended up saying umm for about 30 seconds.

The fourth and fifth time, I have no excuse, I just didn’t like them. Teaching Psychology doesn’t help my situation either because there are some really long words! I won’t even go into detail how many times I had to record myself saying the word ‘ catechol-O-methyltransferase’, I’m pretty sure I still can’t say it.