For this activity I recorded Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly." I choose this poem because it was very popular with high school students for the Poetry Out Loud contest. And I thought having two characters and a narrator would create a fun audio recording.
I used GarageBand for recording and editing. Thanks Smith School for letting me use your MacBook for this process. First I recorded the spider's part, then the fly's, and then the narration. I kept the parts on different tracks so that I could then manipulate the sound for each track and have different "voices" for each part. I quickly learned that I needed to click the microphone on and then wait before speaking, otherwise the mic cut off the first word or so. Then I edited out the dead space at the beginning and ending of each section.
Next I added a music loop to the background. I "ducked" the music so the volume changes if there is a vocal part. You may notice the music is louder when there is no narration and quieter when there is narration.
Uploading the MP3 file to Blogger required a little research since Blogger only allows links, image or video files. I found that I could create a Google Site and upload the MP3 to it and use the URL to link to this blog. By clicking on the link in the blog the MP3 automatically downloads. This is how I created the link at the very beginning of this post.
However, I wanted an embed feature. So a little more research lead me to divShare. This site allows the account holder to store 5GB of information (audio, video, image, etc) for free. After uploading my MP3 I selected embed and then pasted the HTML code on this blog. This creates the MP3 player on the second line of this blog post.
This was a fun project that I can easily see being used in the library curriculum. Students could create podcasts of school news, new books, interesting tidbits that they researched or to create audio books (or chapters). I could create podcasts to create audiobooks for younger readers, provide lessons (citations, research tools, etc) or library announcements. Grammar Girl is a popular podcast in our HS English classes, the library lessons could follow a similar format.
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