Tag: audio

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Slftalk Screen

I’ve had a bit of time to think about David Noble and my experiment at the Scottish Learning festival. I blogged about the preparation and have been thinking about the actual event for a while.

SLFtalk was an experiment for using posterous to aggregate short audio reports from mobile devices at the Scottish Learning festival.

Over the 2 days of the festival and with a couple of late entries we had 29 posts to SLFtalk from a dozen people. There was a wide range of type of poster and content. We had fairly recently qualified classroom teachers and HMI. The content went from recording of segments of seminars through interviews to reflection. Many of the posts have had more than 400 views. Most of the hits came from the time of the festival and just after.

We had offered several routes into audio publishing and most were used:

  • 15 boos tagged slftalk using audioboo by 5 people
  • 12 files posted directly to posterous by 6 people
  • 2 recordings made on the gabcast.com channel by 2 folk

Obviously all of the the audioboos were made using an iPhone, the posts to posterous were made with several different devices; iphones, a HTC Touch Diamond and desktops.

For myself I intended to use the iPhome Voice Memos app, and just email it in. But I ran over the 2 minutes limit for mailing memos so ended up transferring the audio to my macbook, converting to mp3 (cutting down file size) and posting via email. I think I was the only person using a computer rather than a phone.

No one took us up on the offer to borrow mp4 recorders, Joe Dale did use his iRiver to chat to me at the end of the 2 days and later sent me the file to post to the site.

I think it was well worth offering multiple ways of posting, although audioboo was the most popular, if we had just used that several contributors could not join in.

Technically everything seem to work out fine, the main thing I would change is the way the gabcasts and audioboos were posted to the site. basically I just used the posterous API to send the url of the audio to posterous. This meant that the recording were not enclosed in the RSS feed. I have made a few tests and worked out a workaround, if an actual html link in sent to posterous, eg <a href="path_to_audio_file">Listen</a> and we use feedburner to provide the RSS, feedburner will produce an rss feed with all of the enclosures. The file would also play on an iphone.

From a organisational and technical point of view I really enjoyed working with David on this wee project, but the thing I enjoyed most was listening to the audio, given the background noise and less than ideal recording conditions I was surprised at how engaging they were, there is something special about listening to the human voice with all the extra information the signal carries over reading a text.

I think we may have discovered an interesting an powerful addition to our community communication toolkit and hope this concept can be taken forward and more widely used. I would be interested in hearing more from others who used or listen to the podcasts and getting ideas of how to improve the system.

Posted via email from John’s posterous

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On sunday evenings I often take part in EdTechRoundUp. EdTechRoundUp is an informal group of educators, interested in talking about technology. originally planned as a planning meeting for a podcast the meet has evolved into a meeting that becomes a podcast. Planned on the edtechroundup wiki the meeting takes place in a Flash Meeting. Flashmeeting (described as the YouTube of videoconferencing) is a lovely free service for educators to hold online meetings with video, audio and chat elements.

The chats are a lot of fun and a good place to find out about many exciting uses of ICT in the classroom. Anyone cxan add to the agenda on the wiki and anyone can join in. The meetings are often chaired by Doug Belshaw who tidies up the audio for publication on EdTechRoundUp.com.

The audio is recorded not live but from a replay of the flashmeeting by volunteers. I have taken that role a couple of times and used WireTap, as I recall, wiretap pro could be used the same way as wiretap (an older free version) for free but I recently moved macs and downloaded wiretap studio. This worked fine for a couple of weeks and then I got to the end of the trial period. From the information on the WireTap Pro FAQs page I think I could download a version of pro and still use it that way but I’ve found another solution.

I missed the meeting on Sunday but got a tweet from Doug looking for someone to grab the audio. I said I’d do it and then found out that WireTap had timed out.

This is where Soundflower comes in.

Soundflower is a Mac OS X (10.2 and later) system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers.

Quick to download an install, soundflower gives you a couple more options in the Sound input and output preference pannel:

All I need to do was to set Soundflowe 2 channel as the default input and output, I then replayed the flashmeeting and used Audacity to capture the sound.
SoundFlower comes with an app Soundflowerbed (I’ve not tried it yet) and has a lot more features but this did the trick for me.

The other bit of software I used was The Levelator, once I had recorded the audio I exported it as a wav file and dropped that file onto the Levelator:

It’s software that runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three.

The Levelator smoothes out the ups and downs of volume which you get form several folk talking in different places with different microphones to something that is surprisingly clear.

After that I just need to export the output from the Levelator to an mp3 and send it to Doug via dropbox. I had a listen to the audio on the way home from work yesterday and the audio sounds not too bad, the content sounds very good indeed, and I am sorry I was not there, well worth a listen once Doug sorts it out and put it on EdTechRoundUp.com.

I can also recommend joining in the flash meeting anytime you are free on a Sunday evening, a very welcoming space and I’d guarantee that you come away with a few interesting ideas or thoughts. Details are always on the front page of the wiki.

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A while back I installed pmwiki on the Sandaig Primary Site. I’ve now finished one project and am in the middle of another, so it is probably time for a few thoughts.

The Primary 6 Project was a fairly short temp project for 12 children, and just used to display the results of some Garageband and art work.

The Sound & Light section is for a longer (two term) project.
Recently I had some cpd on active learning using a challenge based approach. the leader Alisa Barr of Mount Vernon Primary was kind enough to give me a powerpoint to support the primary six topic sound & light, I decided to adapt it for the Sound & Light wiki. This meant that I was a bit slow in getting the topic up and running last term, but we had several afternoons working on it and the topic will continue until the end of the session.

I am not using the approach with my own class, but the other primary 6 who I teach one afternoon a week (we have 3 teacher for 2 p6 classes to cover learning support, some behaviour and self esteem support and McCrone cover). I have played a bit fast and loose with the time table, spending one and a half to two hours on the topic where it should only get one hour. A disadvantage is that I can’t follow up anything until the next week.

So far the children have posted various movies and some mp3 files with a few more to come.

It has not been plain sailing as we have been plagued by errors in our internet connection:

MYIPROXY ERROR: connection refused
10.250.1.9 refused to accept connection on port 80

and the like. These errors have been coming from many sites not just our own, I’ve flagged it up and hopefully it will get solved soon. The children were also using slideshare.net to post powerpoints to the wiki and to my horror, slideshare was blocked last week. The service desk quickly unblocked it once my HT had requested it.

I think I am learning quite a bit about both active learning and using wikis with children. Next time I do this I will spend a lot more time teaching the it skills and group work strategies before starting the topic. Some of the it components are quite complicated, record (video or audio), put on macbook for editing, edit, transfer to pc for uploading to wiki. I should probably just arrange for movie maker to be available and get audacity installed on the pcs and skip the mac stage. I guess I am guilty of trying to stay in my comfort zone, but for a first run I think that is excusable.

The other aspect is that the children get caught up in the experiments and recording it, so they forget what they are trying to find out. I am going to start to provide instructions on paper as well as on the wiki and see if that helps.

I really like pmwiki especially its flexibility and lack of wysiwyg but I am wondering if it is the right choice for the children. I am going to start another wiki project next week and have decided to try out wikispaces for this one. (I have an unreasonable desire to keep everything on our own site so this goes against the grain). This is for a homework project which my primary 6 will be carrying out over the next term. Each will be researching a European country of their own choice. I’ve done this sort of project with primary six for the last few years and it gives the more enthusiastic children a chance to open up. Of course not all of the children will have internet access at home, so I will be giving them all some time in the media room every Monday. I’ve not tested wikispaces with children before so I’ll be interested in comparing it with pmwiki.