Feb
21
Audacity
Posted by: Diddly | February 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Audacity.png
Hello everyone,
I am sorry to say that I have been away from the platform for a week. We have a two week reading week, but I took the first week off as I am struggling with sleepless nights and the accreditation process at work. It has been a difficult time, but I am happy to say that I am back. My plan for the next week is to advance on my Moodle course as I have not gone beyond the icebreaker yet. This weekend I am going to get ahead with the E-toolkit and see what goodies are out there. First, I downloaded Audacity. It is really simple to use, though my external microphone didn’t work, so I had to resort to the built in one. Once you download the LAME Mp3 decoder it is straightforward to save your audio in Mp3 format. For me the great advantage of recording audio instead of video is the file size. I have a satellite connection, and uploading video is really slow, so audio is great. For EFL, podcasts are a great way to get students listening to English. They could even download files from my Moodle course onto their iPods/telephones and listen to them as an extension to the class. It was really quick to make my first podcast, but designing authentic listening activities to complement my EFL classes is going to be time consuming. I will have to write a script and find actors,which is going to require time. One very practical solution is to investigate podcasts for EFL that are already available on the Web. I would like to add some of these to my course. Though posting the file is better than the link, as links tend to be transient, it may be necessary to use links to avoid copyright infringements. Another idea I have is to get students recording themselves and posting their files onto the course platform. We don’t have Wimba in Moodle, but I will see what possibilities there are for posting audio.