With the emphasis on oral communication in language teaching, it is surprising to me that instructors have not yet taken full advantage of the technology tools available to them for communicative practice. Today’s blog entry is an introduction to Audacity, a piece of software you may already be familiar with. It is installed on all the computers in the LRC and, because it is FREE and CROSS-PLATFORM, it is software you can download and install on your own computers (PC or Mac). The video will show you how easy it is to record sound and then export it to .mp3 format so that it can be emailed, posted to a blog, uploaded to Moodle, used on an iPod or iPad, put in a podcast, or whatever! If you need a microphone, you can check one out from the LRC.
When you download Audacity, you will also need to download and install the LAME encoder. This is another small piece of free software which, when used along with Audacity, will allow you to export your sound files as .mp3 files. The two go together, so watch the video to see how easy it is, then go get Audacity for your computer if you don’t already have it.
P.S. I have been informed that for some reason, the server that this blog resides on is having issues with displaying video in Internet Explorer. If you are having trouble viewing the videos, please switch to a different browser (it works just fine in Foxfire or Safari) until our esteemed servermeister gets the IE glitch fixed. My apologies for the inconvenience.