Because of the roadblocks I mentioned in an earlier post I scrapped the Slideshare idea for this week and played around with Audacity. I enjoy playing audio clips to start out classes and jumpstart discussions. I will often use episodes from Science Fridays, Radio Lab and This American Life. Because I usually only want to listen to a short portion of the broadcast I end up wasting class time fast forwarding and rewinding to find just the point I want. Editing and saving the shortened audio clips sounded like the ticket.
Downloading Audacity is easy and the program is intuitive to use. I wasn’t able to import MP4 files from iTunes, but could import MP3s. I edited a segment from This American Life I really enjoy about parasitic life cycles and saved it as a wav file. I couldn’t export it as an MP3 for some reason. I looked into posting it on Gcast, but Gcast is no longer accepting downloads (Eric, is there anywhere else you recommend?). I was also worried about posting it due to copyright infringement. If you would like a copy of it, leave your email and I will send the file along. Anyway, if you have a few audio files that you use regularly and you hate wasting the time to fast forward and rewind to just the right area because during that time your students will organize a coup, this program may give you a hand at squelching the rebellion.
Hi-I would like to see what you've done. My concerns would also be copyright issues. I'm meeting with our Instructional Designer this week and I'll try to remember to ask him about this. Here's my email, this way I'll be more likely to remember too! kcburke4@gmail.com
ReplyDeleteI love RadioLab! It's my one of my favorite NPR shows and I can't get enough of it. What grades do you teach? I'm not sure if my 7th graders would benefit from it so I haven't tried yet but if another 7th teacher has some episodes that worked ... Thanks for the tip on Audacity. I hear you on not being able to waste time while you get to the good parts. It will be nice to create the perfect audio clip to get the point across.
ReplyDeletehi VF, have you tried chirbit? (chirbit.com)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip!! It's always a good day when you can avoid the coup! I love that teachers can always understand each other.
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