Inserting Audio Clips into Google Forms

I write this blog post with a HEAVY caveat, because on paper, this sounds like a great idea, but during the actual execution of it with over 100 Latin 3 students accessing the audio files multiple times, there were some Google issues of which I was unaware. Proceed at your own caution if you wish to do this!

Did you know that you can insert audio files into Google Forms and turn it into a listening comprehension activity? In this time of digital learning, I was looking for a way to address listening comprehension using Google Forms and came upon this. The downside of this activity is that it is a lot of work on the prep side.

Watch the following video for directions

In trying this out this week with digital learning, I uploaded 10 audio files of individual sentences from a story which we had been reviewing and had students pick the picture (I re-used pictures from my sentence/picture activity) which best matched what they had heard. NOTE - below is a just a screenshot so do not click on the audio file - yes, already a number of you have tried!)

Now here is the caveat. When students attempted to download the audio files, soon they began to see a message stating that they could not download the files. 

This appears to be a common issue among Google Form users, and unfortunately, Google Support has not done much to address this issue - I think that it has to do with too many downloads all at once so Google has set a limit. I ended up transferring the audio files to my digital learning management class page and had students listen to them that way to complete the assignment - not a true fix but it got the job done.

Observations

1. What I like about this (when it works) is that students can listen to these audio clips as many times as they want in order to understand the message.
2. I did this activity at the end of two weeks of doing this particular reading in a digital environment. I did not want to rush into it, since students were essentially learning and teaching themselves this particular passage on their own (even with my support). 
3. I used pictures as answer choices, but I can see giving students different types of answers based on the audio file prompt, such as "Which is the best response to this audio question?" 
4. I can also see having students listen to a much longer passage (2-3 minutes) and asking questions about the passage.