Look what I can do!!

At the end of this week we were introduced to what, in my opinion, is one of the coolest programs yet, Audacity. This is a program that you can use to take music and voice recordings and overlay them to create cool digital files that you can use in many ways in the classroom

In order to use this program what we did in class was record our voices, transfer the recording over to Evernote from an iPhone, and put it into the Audacity program. Once in this program you can edit how loud the sound is, and even put music into the background of your recording. This really creates a 'mood' and something that is another creative output for students. This program is good for you as a teacher if you create an exit slip where you record messages from students, compile them, and listen to them the next day as an activating strategy. Here is a little something I threw together quick using the program, and threw it on a slide in Windows Movie Maker:

On a side note the music in the background of the clip is a song called 'Love You Don't Go' by JEKK from a FREE website called Jamendo, all of the music on this site is free to download and use in videos! This is also another great way to use Evernote, if you are not familiar with the program I have blogged about it a few weeks ago!

 Now Audacity isn't the only cool program that we used this week, we also explored quite a few programs that involve photo editing. Here I have a before and after shot of a picture of my niece that I edited using the programs Citrify and Tuxpi.

Before:

After:

How cute is she? These are two programs that are really cool and both offer a variety of different features that students can easily use, these programs are super user friendly. These photo editing programs are another way to offer students a creative outlet using technology that allows them to express themselves in their projects and presentations and truly make them unique to themselves.

I hope you get some use out of these websites, I know I sure will; I am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my next 5/6 pre-service teaching placement.