How 2 create a natural soundscape

It's the start of the year and I'm struggling a bit with the annual power struggle over who makes the rules in the classroom. Of course it's me, but I've never been happy with the process of establishing that, with all of its top-down implications. I like the result, but the process is very stressful - what with all of the envelope-pushing and peeing on hydrants and such. I'm coming home exhausted, grinding my teeth at night and am frustrated that I'm not doing something that shows more wisdom.

Feeling very stressed out, I started searching for some soothing music to play while grading some online homework submissions, but everything was distracting and added to my stress rather than lessening it. Then I remembered a nature-sounds LP that I used to play while studying in college (yes, I'm old enough to have taken a record player to college), so I did a google search on "nature sounds".

And I found this little bit of loveliness:

This elegantly simple miracle is called a "Free Nature Sounds Mixer" and it can be found at http://naturesoundsfor.me/

Right now I just have it playing while I work in another tab, but if I wanted to I could download my soundscape as a 1-30 minute long file.

In the time it has taken me to open up this blog post, I am NOTICABLY less stressed - I just literally felt the tense muscles in my forehead relax.

Every single one of my class openings will include a 3-minute calm-down that features this mix tomorrow. I'll report back on the students' reactions.

How 2 Convert any file online

I just read about this and it's my new favorite thing.........an online file converter that not only works like a dream, but will send you the results by email if you don't want to sit and wait.

Online-Convert

So far, I have only tried to use it to convert a youtube video to mp3 and it worked wonderfully :) - I'll try more things soon and will expand this post accordingly.

How 2 Make A Recording on the Web

This is Audio Pal, which is a clever little web-based audio recording service. You record or upload your content and they send you an email. The email takes you to another part of their site that gives you embed code for a fairly diverse range of sites (including Blogger).



You can make a recording several different ways - here's one I made over the phone:



You can also type up to 600 characters and use text-to-speech to create an audio file:


I tried making a recording using two different computer microphones - one that was USB and one that used the "normal" mic jack - but the site seemed to get stuck on "processing" and I didn't see any change in the site itself during the recording (the "time elapsed" indicator didn't indicate any time elapsed....). It might just be a glitch today, or possibly something goofy that happened because of the machine or network I'm on today.


Finally, you can upload an MP3 that you've created (maybe with Audacity??). I would recommend STRONGLY against uploading anything you didn't create (I don't have anything like that handy at the moment, but I'll come back and ammend this post later when I do).

All told - I'm impressed - especially by the phone feature.

How 2 Record and Edit sound files

The very coolest sound recording and editing software ever is not only awesome, it's free (and free is a good price)



There are a lot of manuals and resources out there to get the most from this tool, but if you've ever used any sort of recorder (even a tape recorder - remember those?) you can probably start playing within a few minutes.

Your project can then be saved as an audacity project or exported as a wav file or an mp3

Because of copyright laws, the software for encoding mp3 (the format you're most likely to want) can't be distributed directly with this software, but you can quickly download what you need by following the directions HERE

How 2 Share Presentations or Documents on the Web

Powerpoint has pretty much replaced posterboard for research projects that are either supposed to be "more fun" than traditional research papers, or that really do need more visuals than straight text.

However - there are a great many possible formats to these, and the introduction of Microsoft Office 2007, with its members-only format, has made transferring these projects from student computer to teacher computer extra-difficult.

Plus - there's always the problem of "I saved the wrong version" or "my email won't let me send a file that big".

Try www.slideshare.net



Slideshare will handle up to 100MB files in the following formats:
Presentations: pdf, ppt, pps, pptx, ppsx, pot, potx (Powerpoint); odp (OpenOffice); key, zip (Apple Keynote).
Documents: pdf, doc, docx, rtf, xls (MSOffice); odt, ods(OpenOffice); Apple iWork Pages.

You can choose for your document to be viewable by the whole world, just you, or somewhere in between. You can make your file downloadable or not.

This is a free site but it requires a log-in. There is also a short wait time while your file is processed before you can access it. For this blog post, I created a 3-slide powerpoint file and it took just a few seconds to upload, and it was availble for viewing in about 3 minutes.

Not only can your presentation now be viewed (small or full-screen) from any internet-connected computer, but you can generate embed code to post anywhere AND you can email a link to anyone. If you like, slideshare will import your address book from most of the popular webmail services.

Others (from the world, or from the list of people you invited) can leave comments.

There are tools on the site to add in an audio file to create what they call a "slidecast" - this is not to upload music - it's intended for a recording of a speaker who might be using the presentation. [note: make this recording with audacity] If you click on the link for that option, there are several help files available that will guide you through the process of synchronizing the audio file and the visual of your slides.


You can even post a transcript of the audio portion of your presentation.

Most of the presenters at an educational technology convention I recently attended used this site to post the presentation materials they used. A few talked about how they taught their students to use it for projects.

Here's the presentation I created to test this out:

Sample Presentation

View more presentations from awaldfogle.

How 2 record an audio clip

the website is www.vocaroo.com and it's a terrific little free gizmo that allows you to record an audio message through your computer's built-in or plug-in microphone and will then generate a link or embed code for it.

Nothing to download and no limit on the length, but there is no edit or download. Still - it's pretty darned cool.

How 2 Save a YouTube Video as a file

A student actually turned me on to this web conversion tool.

www.mediaconverter.org

This site is very easy to use. All you need is the address of the youtube (or other) site.



1. Click on the icon that says "enter a link".
2. enter the web address in the field that appears and click OK
3. You will return to the original screen, but now there is a green arrow that says "go to the next step" - click that arrow (it's easy to overlook this)
4. Choose the file format you want - you'll notice there is quite a selection :) .wmv will work for most PC applications, .avi is used by QuickTime, and mpeg will work for most everyone.
5. Click OK and then wait for your conversion to happen




MAKE SURE YOU CLICK THE DOWNLOAD LINK before you navigate away from this last screen - and be aware of the daily limit to 5 downloads with the free version of this website. For a subscription fee, you can have unlimited downloads and unlimited file sized, but the free version has sufficed for me so far.

You'll also notice the ability to strip audio from posted videos, and the ability to change almost any audio or video format into almost any other.

It's a sweet site.