Experiencing Audio for Content: Live and Learn!

This week's focus was on how to use a learning object to teach content learning ( see 21st Century Skills). Student read about content learning and reflected on how to use audio to teach either declarative, procedural or knowledge. To prepare, I created an audio file as a demonstration: http://www.gcast.com/u/ldriskel/main.xml Unfortunately, we could barely hear the sound and turning up the volume on the classroom equipment didn't help. I will add checking volume on teacher station to my to do list.

Next the students created their audio files. I chose to use Audacity for several reasons. One because it had already been installed on both the PCs and the MACs I have in the classroom. Two because it is an application which is free and easily available for my students to download on their personal computers. And three, because it is fairly easy to use.

They were up and running in no time with microphones and headphones (helped to diminish noise while recording took place). One student is challenging herself by using a MAC, she did not need a microphone because it is built in to the MAC.

Students all did a great job coming up with ideas for content lessons using audio such as singing a song as a mnemonic device for remembering the colors in the rainbow. They also were real troopers creating their audio files - it is so difficult to record alone in my office but much more so in a classroom of students! We ran into a glitch when attempting to export our audio. We were not able to convert them to the MP3 format that is necessary for uploading to the web. I knew Audacity had been installed but I never thought to check for the side application, the LAME encoder, that is necessary for converting Audacity project files to MP3s. Live and learn is our motto in this course!

I will make time in a upcoming class for revisiting Audacity and audio file conversion now that LAME encoder has been installed - after I check that is has anyway!