Using audio
Adding voice and sound
By adding audio to your learning resources you can add an extra dimension of information and engagement for your students. It is much easier to listen to a piece of information, particularly if it is complex, than to read it on the screen. It also adds a personal and human element to the learning resource.
Recording Audio files
You need to consider the size of the recording file when you make an audio record. Long high quality audio files can be quite large. Making a number of recordings of several minutes is a better strategy than creating one long recording. The file type can also affect the file size. MP3 files are quite small and are played by most browser plug-ins.
To reduce files size, choose a recording quality of 11,000 Hz. This is equivalent to a good phone conversation. CD quality is 44,000 Hz and will create very large file sizes. Make sure your recordings are made as mono rather than stereo recordings. This will also reduce the file size and you will not be able to hear the recording in stereo when played from a web page.
Make sure have a good quality microphone. It does not have to be a broadcast quality microphone but using the inbuilt microphone in a laptop computer will probably give a god quality recording.
Putting audio into your web pages
You add audio to your learning resources in two ways. You can link to the recording file or you can embed the file in the web page
- Link to an audio file – Store your audio file(s) in folder with your web pages. On your web page add a link to the audio file. This method will open a new window in which the browser will load the player plug-in and play the audio.
- Embed an audio file – If you embed an audio file in a web page it will play at the same time as you view the page. You will need to do a little bit of HTML coding to embed an MP3 file in a page. Open the web page in an html editor and place the following embed tag code in the page.
<embed loop="false" hidden="true" autostart="true" src="/your_adio_file.mp3" />
A good place to add the code is at the end of the HTML code before the </html> tag.
Make sure you place the relative path link to the audio file in the embed tag. The simplest way to do this is to store the audio file in the same folder as the web page(s) and simply put the audio file name in the embed tag.
A good web site to see how to make and use voice recordings is at World Voices.
http://www.world-voices.com/resources/addaud.html
Resources
- Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Audacity is a freely downloadable program that allows you to record audio files. You can record your voice or other audio for inclusion in your learning materials, edit the audio tracks or import and remix other audio files. These files can be saved as .wav or .mp3 format ready play directly from your web page.
