Mein Puppenhaus Ein Projekt mit Picasa3 und Audacity
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The joy of recording!
because they have spotted a pronunciation mistake or a grammatical error! I mean, how often do you hear students wanting to repeat themselves when they speak in another language??? The recording exercise allows this magical phenomenon to happen! And even better, students love it when they know their recordings will be embedded on the school blog and therefore available for the world to listen to. This week I have decided to try to use it as often as I can in an attempt to make my students visit the blog and leave comments. I have noticed they do visit the blog but they have not yet stepped into the commenting phase. Do you have any suggestions to make students comment on a blog? If you haven't tried this yet, please do. You can find microphones at a very affordable price and they are so easy to use with Audacity. You can then save your recordings as .wav or.mp3 files and easily embed them onto your blog or website. You will see your students being motivated to SPEAK ;) What about you? what do you do to make your students speak in another language?
EtherPad: Realtime Collaborative Text Editing
EtherPad
EtherPad is the only web-based word processor that allows people to work together in really real-time.
When multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are instantly reflected on everyone's screen. The result is a new and productive way to collaborate on text documents, useful for meeting notes, drafting sessions, education, team programming, and more.
via etherpad.com
First saw this at Studyguru's site. Reminded me of what is promised in Google Wave. May be worth checking it out - or suggesting some group tries it and reports back?
It gets round ‘the elephant in the room’ with Wikis – which can be summed up as: ‘first to save wins’. This is an issue on Kaleidos as on many Wikis. I had to demonstrate it to the guy who last came in from RM as he didn’t believe me – but if two people work at the same time, whoever saves second loses all their changes. Now that’s hardly in the spirit of collaboration, is it? So groups need a way to signal when it is being edited or better still, the software should warn that it is being edited.
Spanish blog for my students.
All you have to do is to write an email as your post (as I am doing now) and send it to Posterous. Posterous takes care of the rest. If you want to send a video, you attach it to the email or copy the URL into your email and Posterous will show the video in your post. If you want to send a picture, just copy the image location or attach it to your email. Again Posterous will show the picture in your post. If you want to send a slideshow or a document, attach it to your email, Posterous takes care of the rest.
I did a lot a recordings this year with students using a little microphone plugged into my laptop and Audacity. I save the recordings as .mp3 files and attach them to the emails I send to Posterous. Posterous insert the audio files into the new posts and this way, students can listen to their own recordings (which they looove!).
So far so good... They are not many comments made by students yet, but I know it takes a while and it is a learning process. The blog is http://spanishblog.posterous.com/ and of course, your comments are welcome as well :)
What about you? which platform do you use to blog and why?
Using Audacity To Edit Audio
One thing that I've always wanted to try and get into was podcasting. It was about 2005 or so when I started listening, and I've got a pretty regular group that I listen to at the moment - Leo Laporte's TWIT network, CNet's Buzz Out Loud, and for pure entertainment, LUG Radio, which, while it may not necessarily be family entertainment, is still funny as hell in my book.
And while I'd love to give podcasting a go, I can tell you right now that I don't have enough to say to make the effort worthwhile. It's something that I'd like to do, but without a clear idea of what I'd be doing a regular show about, it just ain't gonna happen.
So I'm having to be content with learning to edit audio with Audacity, which is a great little open source audio editing tool, available on SourceForge. After finding a couple of online tutorials on how easy it is to edit the audio files that you generate, I gave it a bit of a try myself, and the results were quite surprising. I read a passage of text, and when I exported it to MP3, it was about 38 seconds.
Then I went back and edited out all of the 'uhs' and long pauses, and got it to sound much better, cutting about 5 seconds off of the duration of the MP3. Which means that I either say 'um' a lot more than I think, or I sure dropped some long pauses in there. Probably a combination of the two, really.
If audio is something that you've been interested in trying to work with, download Audacity and give it a go. It's really much easier than you think it'll be.
The power of web 2.0 tools
Today, I got very exciting when I checked my email box and found an email form one of my year 8 student (12-13 years old) saying:
Hello, miss, here is my montage. I would like you to know that I couldn't find a music that would fit in my presentation, I tried my best.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the presentation.
Take care
bye
See My Montage 5/25/09 online.
For the past few weeks, I have worked with my year 8 class on a project about holidays. I asked them to prepare a spoken presentation about what they usually do on holidays and to add pictures on One True Media. It allows you to create a presentation with pictures and sounds (a bit like Animoto). I recorded my students' spoken presentations on Audacity and saved them as mp3 files. They then added their voices to their One True Media presentations. All of this was class work and I never asked my students to finish the work at home. So I was very happily surprised when I received this email on a Sunday evening! This student had got to one true media on her own and finished the presentation on her own! This is the first time it happens to me and this is all due to the power of web 2.0!
What about you? Have you had students working on their own without you having "to bribe" them? Do you think web 2.0 tools engage our students much more?
First attempt at a digital story: Tales of Wooragee
Well, here it is: made using Audacity and Photostory 3. The story, documents and main pictures are from our family history, with the house and views of Wooragee borrowed from the net - sorry I can't attribute them directly; the boys with the snake is by Grey Villet and appeared in 'Life' Magazine; the image of the brown snake is from Melbourne Museum; the music is mine. The poem is an adaptation of a peice written at Nettlecombe Manor during a 'National Writing Project in Somerset and Wiltshire' writing weekend during the late 1980s. Sadly, although the original has stuck in my mind, I cannot recall the writer.
The hardest part was trying to synchronise the sound and images. In the end, I tried running the preview of the video whilst recording one long take on Audacity. I had to fiddle around and re-record one section which I then edited back in. I added a couple of sections of silence (the only way I could think of getting one section to line up better). There seemed to be more 'luck' then judgment, and I now know I need to look more closely at my understanding of Audacity.
I read a piece earlier today (which I must find again) suggested doing sound first and then adding images. I worked the other way round on this one, so perhaps when I do the next one (???!) using Moviemaker I'll try that out.
When students are doing it for themselves
When the latest pile of work from students lands on my desk I have been known to let out the occasional groan. But on a recent Monday morning, three attachments to an email really caught my eye. My Year 10 students (14-15 year olds) having just read 'A View From the Bridge' had been commissioned to create a portfolio of 'Original Writing' for their GCSE coursework inspired by the play. This student submitted the front page of a newspaper with an account of the death of Eddie Carbone and these two peices. Well, you just have to listen.
The accompanying mp3 is, I think, simply stunning. The choice of rhythms and phrasing is powerful, vivid and extraordinary to my ears. And the interesting thing is that it demonstrates again what students can produce when given a bit a freedom from the constraints we teachers sometimes impose. He produced the rap using Audacity and a cheap microphone - with a backing 'borrowed' from somewhere else.
As teachers, we often try to appear to be the ones holding the skills and the knowledge. But I wonder how many of us could have produced something like this? It is making me reconsider the kind of tasks I set and expectations I have of my students.
Rap By Marco by Sina (Beat Prod. By Just Blaze)
(download)
Digital Stories
Center for Digital Storytelling seems to be a useful site on this topic and contains an interesting extract from their Cookbook http://www.storycenter.org/cookbook.pdf
There are some excellent examples to be found on this site too. Basically they are short (approx 400 words) recorded personal stories, illustrated with sequences of (usually) still photographs with a soundtrack. Audacity is the obvious way of recording the soundtrack. I wonder which would be the easiest way of pulling in the photos and adding the soundtrack? Studio8 /Premiere? Windows Story Maker3?
I like the idea of using it to tell personal stories. It reminds me a bit of the protobooks from people like Yorkshire Arts Circus (?) I looked at a few years ago. The short text is appealing as it wouldn't overface students and would encourage fine crafting of their writing which simply doesn't happen well with longer texts. It also makes the final product more manageable for sharing with real audiences.
The suggestions in the .pdf include:
- getting students to record their writing three times so that they can then extract the best bits
- record using interviewers and then editing the questions out
- limit students to plan on 6x4 postcards
