• English language arts: Students can create a retelling of an event by making an audio recording and adding sound effects that reflect or enhance the content they are creating. English learners could also change a portion of a story to tell it from a different point of view. This can be used to tell a story from a different cultural perspective or from a different character’s point of view, to practice conjugating verbs.
• Mathematics: Groups of students can create guess-my-shape narrations in which they explain the attributes that describe the geometric shapes, adding sound effects or music. Students can also record themselves modeling how to solve a mathematics problem in different ways. They then splice together the different pieces of audio to make one recording of the different explanations.
• Social science: Students can create a narrative around an event, such as what would have happened if the United States had never landed a man on the moon. Students can tell the story, incorporating different points of view using alternative voices (for example, voices for a newscaster, a cowboy, and an astronaut), and use a lot of expression and inflection to enhance the recording.
• Science: Groups of students can create weather report narratives by pretending to be a meteorologist on a radio broadcast or a podcast focusing on climate change.
Learning goal:
I can edit and enhance multiple audio clips by adding sound effects to create a final product.
Wow: Engaging My Audience With Sound Effects
In this lesson, students will enhance their projects by adding sound effects to engage their audience. The use of certain sound effects can enhance a presentation; however, sound effects also can distract the audience. Students need to discover when it seems appropriate to use certain sound effects and when it may be appropriate to leave the project without audio distractions.
Process: Enhancing a Project With Sound Effects
To complete the following six lesson steps, we recommend you use VoiceThread (https://voicethread.com) to set up an online collaborative space for students to create video, voice, and text commenting. VoiceThread is a paid subscription service. If you prefer, you can adapt this process for use with a variety of other options. Options include but are not limited to iMovie (www.apple.com/imovie), PowerPoint, Voki (www.voki.com), and WeVideo (www.wevideo.com).
TEACHING TIPS
1. Have students navigate to https://voicethread.com and create an account.
2. Students will click the Create button in the top-left hand corner to then add media. A menu will pop up and students click Audio Recording.
TECH TIPS
3. If it is the first time that students are using the program, they should allow access to the microphone. The program then begins recording immediately.
4. When recording is complete, students click on the red button. They should then give their project a title and description, and save.
5. Students can edit and enhance recording as needed through tools in VoiceThread. Some of these tools include doodling, adding video, and uploading a comment.
6. Students can then add multimedia comments and share presentations.
Connections
You can apply this lesson to different content areas in the following suggested ways.
• English language arts: Students make an audio recording as they retell a story, changing one element of the story, such as the location or time period. Students then react to the change in location as if they were the characters in the story in the audio recording. Students can modify the audio clip based on the element they change. For example, if the setting has changed to the top of a mountain, they might add howling wind to the clip.
• Mathematics: Students can create audio reports as they identify mathematical concepts outside the classroom, such as doubling a recipe, which would include the mathematical concept of adding fractions. Students should be creative as they create their audio clips, for example by including sound effects like the blender operating or an oven door opening if they are creating a recipe.
• Social science: Students can create a report from a historic event, including background sounds.
• Science: Students can use multiple audio clips to create a real-world report. For example, students can report on changing weather conditions. Students can then insert sound effects (such as wind, rain, and sirens) into the recording to enhance their final report.
• Music: Students can create a new musical composition, using tracks of music from various sources and adding in their own sound effects to enhance the audio track.
Creating Meaningful Multimedia Projects
In these lessons, students will focus on gathering multiple types of resources to create one multimedia project, giving students the ability to have voice and choice as they draw upon visual, audio, and annotation tools to create a multimedia project that demonstrates their learning.
Learning goal:
I can create a multimedia poster, embedding photos and text to demonstrate my understanding.
Novice: Using Visuals to Show My Learning
Teachers can check how well students understand a task, lesson, or unit by having them create a visual aid. Prior to the pervasiveness of technology in our lives and classrooms, students used poster board and markers, but now, they can show the world what they know using multimedia. This lesson focuses on creating multimedia posters that embed text and photos.
Process: Creating Visuals
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