Here’s a question from one of our participants.  Jane and I will be sure to get an answer up soon – maybe someone out there would like to leave a comment as well?

Hi folks. Maybe someone can help me. My students have recorded themselves reading a picture book using the digital recorder you provided us (thank you for all of the wonderful equipment by the way – side note). I plug the digital recorder into our computer and we listen and all is great…we are listening through the windows media player. Now the problem is, we are trying to put these “stories” onto cd’s to leave in our library as a listening centre for younger readers. It will not burn onto cd for me and I have tried a variety. I have also used the little laptop you provided us and they recorded using audacity. Can anyone help the “technologically challenged” as myself on how do I get all of this onto cd’s?
Thanks – Janine from MES

Click here for a larger version of this tutorial.

This is one of those “It’s been a long week and I don’t need this” stories.

I had been pushing time a bit this week to get an edition of Portable Radio Point of View out in time for Remembrance Day. The students had done some really good reflecting on the topic and so I needed to get this podcast done and done now before it became “old news”.

I decided to work on my Asus Eee PC 4G computer to do the edit. Things seemed to be going well but all of a sudden I would get a friendly message telling me that Audacity was sorry but it would have to close. AAAARGH!!! Of course I hadn’t been regularly saving the work I was doing.

Start again…this time saved work, often. Again part way through the edit…Audacity was very sorry but it had to close.

I am a slow learner so it took a few of these before I clued in that I needed to alter the way that I was working. It seems that this was a memory issue. Once I started saving my work to the 8gb memory card instead of the little Asus, life improved and the work got done.

Anyway, if this sounds familiar to you you could be experiencing a memory issue. I know that I am. Did I also mention that I lost my car keys two weeks ago. Put them down somewhere and….

P.S. I think it is a really good episode of Portable Radio. Take a listen at portableradio.ca

Tracey Nicholson from Jack Donahue Public School sent us some questions her students had about Audacity.  Jane and I have encountered these obstacles in the past and thought it would be worthwhile sharing:

Hi Nathan:

We are having trouble with exporting our “Audacity” file into a mp3 file.
We are also having trouble with coping and pasting Audacity files.

If you can help us that would be great.

I’ll take a crack at answering these questions.

“We are having trouble with exporting our ‘Audacity’ file into a mp3 file.”

When you export an Audacity file to MP3 you go to File/Export as MP3.  The purpose of doing this is to create a much smaller sized audio file that can easily be played on everyone’s computer over the Internet.

You will run into trouble if a file called the LAME MP3 encoder was not installed along with Audacity.  For copyright reasons this file has to be installed separately.  It’s simple enough to do if you are using a home computer or have permission to install software on your school computer.  Just follow this link and follow the instructions there.

“We are also having trouble with coping and pasting Audacity files.”

As far as copying and pasting files, I’m assuming the problem happens after you’ve saved your Audacity project and you decide to copy the Audacity files onto a flash drive or move it to another folder.  When you go to open up the copied Audacity file much of the sound is missing.  Aaaargh!

There’s a simple way to avoid this and, once you’ve done it, it stays in the software’s settings, meaning you probably won’t have to do it again.

Here’s what you do:

1.  In the menu select Edit the Preferences.
2.  Click on “File Formats”
3.  Select “Make a copy of the file before editing (Safer)”

This will make sure all of the bits and pieces of audio you need are included the folder you copy over.

I hope this is useful.

It is always the way… after a day or afternoon spent at a workshop, either presenting or receiving, I am so wired at night that I have difficulty falling asleep. Perhaps it is just the getting out of the classroom and having the opportunity to share ideas with others. I always find it invigorating.

I feel that we missed an opportunity yesterday to share ideas about how we can use audacity in our classrooms. So last night, with my mind racing, I started to think about ways students can use audacity without even needing to edit or publish the audio.

1. Have students record themselves delivering their public speaking speeches. They can listen to it being played back and do a self assessment.
2. French or English as a second language teachers can record students for feedback on their pronunciation.
3. In math, I have used audacity to record a student explaining his math problem. This students has difficulty writing and I wanted to have a true picture of what he knew. Having him record his solutions independently allowed me the freedom to move around the class and help other students.

I know that people left yesterday’s workshop not only with the hardware to start recording but also with ideas of how they were going to use those headsets. Please share your ideas either with us here through a comment or drop me an email so that I can pass the ideas on. The more we can help each other, the easier it is to introduce new technologies.

The following videos are from www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com:

• Recording Setup
• The Editing Tools
• Basic Editing and Trimming Your Audio
• Adjusting Levels
• Importing Audio and Adding Music to Your Podcast
• Saving Your Project and Exporting the MP3