Month: November 2015

Here are a few resources we’ve pulled together for this part of the session:

• A zip of the printed instructions that I’ve handed out (this includes some sample files)
• Some Audacity links, a quick screencast and a couple of examples where I’ve put it to use.
• A “How to” on add audio to Blackboard
• Experience tells me that if you are doing anything with sound the quality of the recording is important.  It’s good to think about the microphone quality and background noise before you start recording.
• If you’re sad there’s no Photostory you can see how to do something similar in Powerpoint or with Movie Maker  (but look at these after trying out Animoto in the other parallel session).

 

 

After you have crafted your audio file, you’ll want to share it. Unlike video, audio files are generally very reasonably sized and can be uploaded easily to Blackboard as they are.  Look for the “audio” item in when you use “Build Content”.

A slightly more fiddly way to handle this is to uploading the file to an audio/video site (NUVision, Soundcloud), copy the embed code for this and pasting this into a Blackboard content item. Unless you want to discourage people from downloading the file there’s really no advantage to this longer way round.

You’ll see both of these in the short screenrecording above.

Audacity is a really useful tool for creating audio files.  These can be used for podcasts;  audio feedback (as a student I’ve really appreciated “tone” and learning points);  and edit together sound tracks from different sources.

JISC’s guide on the use of Audio Feedback for Assessment gives an excellent summary of the pros and cons of audio feedback.  They also have a helpful page on Creating an Audio Podcast.

Here are some of my examples where I’ve used Audacity for specific purposes:

• We recorded Dr Rob Collins and then constructed a VideoScribe to match the audio.
• Confronted with a Petcha Kucha I used Audacity to record 40 second chunks and practice the presentation

It’s easy to use – here are some basics:

NB:  If you are interested I recorded this using the screen recording feature that arrived in PowerPoint 2013 this February.

 

Here’s another approach to dismissing those (painful?) memories of lost PhotoStory. We can use good-old PowerPoint to insert pictures in an album and make a video from this. To me this seems much easier!

Rather than my dull screenshots imagine a set of lovely images. If you’d like to follow these instructions then have a look at this pdf of this (movie/ppt): PowerPointAsPhotoStory

oopsy….we were thinking about what to show at our next NUTELA and “Photostory” came up.   But, oh dear, although colleagues may have had fond memories of using it, it appears to have expired with XP.

We’ll be looking at Animoto during our session, but here are a couple of other ways of achieving the same thing.  First off Windows Movie Maker (a free download).

You can also see this as a pdf – MovieMakerAsPhotoStory

What do you think?  A bit faffy for me.