Over the last couple of weeks, I've been having some fun with Audacity.
The first thing I did with the program was to record some interviews with teachers for the case-study on inquiry learning that I have been conducting for my Humanities Method Subject. I think students could use the program to record interviews for their own research/inquiry-based projects, too. Using the program in this way, you're not really doing anything that you couldn't do with a tape-recorder. However, lap-tops are more prevalent than tape-recorders (even the MP3 variety) these days, and audacity is free to download, so students using it for interviews seems to make sense.
The next thing I did with the program was to try and make some music. I thought this would push me to learn more about what Audacity can do.
My initial plan was to sample and loop a beat from one of the tracks in my iTunes library. That went off pretty smoothly, and the next thing I knew, I had added a bunch of other samples, including a bit of Bartok piano, a darbukka, an oud, and another bit of piano. Here's the track.
The first thing I did with the program was to record some interviews with teachers for the case-study on inquiry learning that I have been conducting for my Humanities Method Subject. I think students could use the program to record interviews for their own research/inquiry-based projects, too. Using the program in this way, you're not really doing anything that you couldn't do with a tape-recorder. However, lap-tops are more prevalent than tape-recorders (even the MP3 variety) these days, and audacity is free to download, so students using it for interviews seems to make sense.
The next thing I did with the program was to try and make some music. I thought this would push me to learn more about what Audacity can do.
My initial plan was to sample and loop a beat from one of the tracks in my iTunes library. That went off pretty smoothly, and the next thing I knew, I had added a bunch of other samples, including a bit of Bartok piano, a darbukka, an oud, and another bit of piano. Here's the track.
I had not done any of this sort of thing since the mid-nineties, when I had access to a sampler and sequencer that were already about five years old at the time. I have had some experience recording with Pro-Tools in the intervening decade and a half, although I have always played an instrument (usually guitar) whilst someone else had taken care of the technical tinkering.
I found Audacity much easier to use than the old sequencer-sampler combo. The main advantage is that with Audacity you can manually quantize your loops by eye, instead of having to rely solely on your ear.
I’m not a music teacher, so you might assume that I wouldn't get many opportunities to teach students how to loop beats. However, I am an ESL teacher, and it’s not that unusual for students to be asked to put together raps in ESL lessons. So, I might be able to put together some beats for that purpose.
Here's a YouTube video of a particularly hip ESL teacher, Jason R. Levine AKA Fluency MC, who makes rap to teach his students irregular verbs.
I’m not a music teacher, so you might assume that I wouldn't get many opportunities to teach students how to loop beats. However, I am an ESL teacher, and it’s not that unusual for students to be asked to put together raps in ESL lessons. So, I might be able to put together some beats for that purpose.
Here's a YouTube video of a particularly hip ESL teacher, Jason R. Levine AKA Fluency MC, who makes rap to teach his students irregular verbs.
Fluency seems to be onto something. In her article "Music for Engaging Young People in Education", Carmen Cheong-Clinch writes,
Observations indicate that the use of music as a tool for engagement ... was effective in meeting the therapeutic objectives of increasing self-esteem and self-expression, building peer relation- ships, and increasing language skills.
I think there could be some other uses for the program in the ESL classroom. Specifically, I think that students could use it to record dialogues which they could then transcribe. Alternatively, they could - with permission of course - use the program to record their chemistry or biology lessons, and then work towards creating transcriptions of these lessons. This would help them to build mastery of subject specific lexicon, which - as Fang and Scheleppegrell point out in their article, "Language and Reading in Secondary Content Areas" - tends to be a problem for ESL students.
Observations indicate that the use of music as a tool for engagement ... was effective in meeting the therapeutic objectives of increasing self-esteem and self-expression, building peer relation- ships, and increasing language skills.
I think there could be some other uses for the program in the ESL classroom. Specifically, I think that students could use it to record dialogues which they could then transcribe. Alternatively, they could - with permission of course - use the program to record their chemistry or biology lessons, and then work towards creating transcriptions of these lessons. This would help them to build mastery of subject specific lexicon, which - as Fang and Scheleppegrell point out in their article, "Language and Reading in Secondary Content Areas" - tends to be a problem for ESL students.
References:
Cheong-Clinch, Carmen,(2009) "Music for Engaging Young People in Education", Youth Studies Australia VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2.
Fang, Zhihui & Scheleppegrell, Mary J. (2008) "Language and Reading in Secondary Content Areas" In, Reading in secondary content areas: a language-based pedagogy (pp.1-17). University of Michigan Press.
Learn more about Fluency MC at <http://www.colloandspark.com/>
Learn more about Fluency MC at <http://www.colloandspark.com/>
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