I'm trying to teach mini-me about microphones, are there any applications which will let you simply play the microphone's input through the pc's speakers, without having to record it first and play it back?

I can't just plug the mic into the speakers directly as it's a USB mic.

Why downloading a program when you could just use the Windows Sound Mixer? Maybe not the most sophisticated solution, but in your case it should do the trick...

Nice, then you can teach your mini-me about feedback too. Good luck explaining that one.

bbman should be right though, it's usually just a case of unmuting the mic input in the output portion of the mixer.

Quote from bbman :

Why downloading a program when you could just use the Windows Sound Mixer? Maybe not the most sophisticated solution, but in your case it should do the trick...

this. on the playback options there should be a slider for the microphone. bear in mind that you also need to slide one on the record options, and IIRC, they're not linked so you will have to adjust both to your tastes. (so you're not deafening yourself or whoever plays back the recorded audio [if applicable])