Moodle 2.5 Multimedia Cookbook by Second Edition

Author:Second Edition
Format: epub

Chapter 5. Working with Audio, Sound, Music, and Podcasts

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

Recording audio from a microphone

Creating and embedding a podcast using SoundCloud

Using VoiceThread to record presentations

Embedding a presentation in VoiceThread in Moodle

Using LibriVox to embed an audiobook

Allowing a student to record audio

Introduction

This chapter explains how to work with different types of audio files to include sounds, music, and podcasts to Moodle courses. These recipes will teach you how to use different tools to record, edit, and convert different audio file formats, covering common scenarios for multimedia Moodle activities.

The sense of hearing plays an important role in learning a language due to the fact that there are plenty of students whose ability to learn depends on their musical intelligence. Besides, inserting this type of multimedia into our activities makes them more interesting to our students.

We can combine several pieces of recording with not only our own voice, but also somebody else's or with different sounds in the background. This way, podcasts won't be dull for students like when they have to listen only to the teacher speaking. The mixture of sounds, audio, and music is interesting because students can listen to small pieces of recordings or music, as well as us explaining what they are hearing.

Podcasting is an excellent way to share different elements with students. We can combine parts of recordings to make it possible for our students to listen to them as if they were radio shows created by their own teacher, depending on how creative we can be. Once we are confident with podcasts, we can enhance them easily.

Students can record their podcasts too. Some of the skills that students develop by creating podcasts include writing scripts and listening and speaking skills. They learn how to speak better because they have to pay attention to what they listen to. It is advised that students listen to our podcasts first and then make their own.

The baseline topic of this chapter is music and sounds around the world. Therefore, in our recipes, we will design several types of activities in which we need to use audio. We can combine several types of ingredients to make our recipes quite spicy!

The software that we use to create the podcast is Audacity. It is free and open source and works with several operating systems (OSes), such as Windows and Macintosh, among others. Therefore, we can use it no matter which OS we run in our computers. It is a very nice tool to explore because we can enhance our skills in the art of podcasting if we learn to use it.

An interesting type of audio file is MIDI. Unfortunately, Moodle 2.5 does not work with MIDI files at the time this book is being written; one option is to convert MIDI files to MP3 files and upload them to our Moodle course. This is a step that can be taken in case we are fond of these types of files.

Later on in the chapter, we learn how to

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