Monday 23 April 2018

Follow the yellow brick podcast!!


Image by Alex Molina. CC0 Creative Commons.

Hello my dear visitors!!

Today I'm at home listening to a podcast about Criminology. Learning through podcasts is more convenient to me, I can use my mp3 player or just visit a website anytime.

I'm sure that teachers can take advantage of such a powerful tool. As I told you before, one of the great advantages is the portability. Podcasts can be downloaded to a mobile device, allowing students to access anywhere 24 hours a day. Your students will find them encouraging, because it is better listening to a podcast than spending a long time reading an article, for instance.

My teacher friend also wants to share with you his drama project about "The Wizard of Oz":
'I'm preparing a drama workshop in my school including a final performance of this musical. At first I wanted to focus on improving my students' oral skills, but then it turned into a rush of ideas involving different curricular areas. Using podcasts was one of them. Students can use podcasts preparing a dramatic reading as a previous practice before the performance in front of the audience, mainly focusing on pronunciation and intonation and developing their oral skills. It is also a great opportunity to teach them how to use some audio tools. I've chosen Audacity to record and edit the podcast and then Soundcloud to upload their work and share it. Audacity is an intuitive tool, although they are not supposed to learn all the features, just selecting some effects (Adding reverb, change pitch, volume or tempo, fade in/out,...) they will learn to 'play' with the voice and music.
Soundcloud offers a space in the cloud to upload their audio productions and share them with their classmates and teachers, as well as embedding the sound files in your Facebook & Twitter posts.
It supports AIFF, WAV, FLAC, ALAC, OGG, MP2, MP3, AAC, AMR, and WMA files. Although it is not a tool specifically designed for education, is quite useful and meets our needs. It allows to create your own playlists selecting tracks from other users,

Here's my project on Google Docs:


You can listen here the welcome to my students:



Here's the Creative Commons License...

For this audio file I have recorded my personal piano version of 'Somewhere over the rainbow' and 'Follow the yellow brick road' and then applying some sound effects using Audacity (changing the tempo for the music as well as the pitch and reverb for the voice) and then add some free audio files from Freesound (effects), a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps...released under Creative Commons Licenses that allow their reuse. You can browse the sounds using keywords and interact with fellow sound-artists.

Now I want to show you a playlist I have created from other user files in Soundcloud.


And here you can see my channel. Stay tuned!




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