Students continue to film and we begin to record the narration. Each child brings up script and we do several takes of each audio. SOUND RECORDING Students have used Audacity on every animation project I have conducted. By eliminating the distraction and sometimes embarrassment of having their faces on screen, Audacity give the students a way to hear themselves and truly focus on their oral reading and verbal emotive skills.
REQUIRE A SCRIPT Require a script. I asked for one or two sentences. Have students think of their audience.
A PHYSICAL MICROPHONE GOES A LONG WAY Even the most distracted students become very focused with a microhone in front of them. It sobers them up quickly. That is part of the reason I use a physical microphone ($15.00 for a simple one). I use a microphone also to give them something physical to talk to. I do not let them look at the screen when they do their final recording. I have found that they get too distracted when they watch the audiowaves as they are generated. I give them a chance to do a few tests when they can watch and listen to the audio waves as they create them and then I flip around the computer so that the cannot see the screen and instead are looking at me or another student as they speak. AMBIENT NOISE!! One thing that is always big challenge in the real classroom is the noise level...of students, the air conditioner, a teacher's fridge, the fish tank...etc. You many not realize it but a classroom is not quite ever! It is certainly no sound stage! I find it useful to be sure that my input volume is not at the highest level. Set that too high and you will pick up every ambient sound in the room and you will end up spending extra time using effects to try to reduce it. I also record with a couple of seconds breather space of no voice at the beginning and at end of my recordings. Later on I go in and highlight a few seconds of this "silence" and using Audacity's "Noise Removal" tool under "effects" I select "get noise profile". Then I select ALL of the audio and go back to "Noise Removal" and with the slider bar set to "less" select "Remove Noise". This usually removes the ambient noise and leaves a very clean audio file.
But maybe you will have better luck with getting quite rooms to record in and won't have to do any of this audio editing of ambient noise. I have never had such luck! TIP: Always have a related secondary project for student to work on during an audio recording day. This way, you can work one on one or in teams of three with students to do each recording and the rest of the students are working in teams on other components of the animation...usual credits scenic backgrounds or they are working individually on shadow boxes with their clay parts or on invitations for their parents to come to the screening of their animation at the school. The point is, if you are doing audio recording, have another component of the project for them to work on when waiting to record.
Below: animation test of still images taken by Mrs. Weber's 3rd grade class. The students import the images into iMovies in the school computer lab. They will add their narration and music. The music will be recorded at a Chinese Immersion School in Cupertino, Meyerholz Elementary.