Soundcloud Tutorial Two: Create and annotate a private audio podcast for educational purposes

What I want to do is take a look at what I would suggest some of our more advanced students would do and how to use this as a tool. So one of the cool things about soundcloud as you’ll see is that there’s a way that you can go in and you can annotate audio clips.

So what you’ll see is here is a clip by cindy tss, red, hot chili peppers and basically, let’s go into the the adventure club remix. So if you take a look at this all these little slashes here, those are areas where somebody that’s in this community went in and left the annotation okay. So you can see this person here up south been waiting on a new one for a minute. It was worth the wait that might not be exactly what you want your kids talking about in class, but you can see the power that’s involved in this, so you could.

You could have a piece here where you record an audio clip or your students could record an audio clip and then, if you or they go in, you can basically go in and grab the audio clip and then annotate it we’re going to take a look at Some classical music I’m going to go in and look at this track right here and there’s only a couple. But let’s see how this looks so as audio is playing, so you see ghosts, prints came in and said, lovely there’s a way for individual students to come in and leave their text leave their annotations and it’s pretty easy to do so.

I’r going to go in, you saw a piece that I had here. I could be listening to the clip that we just recorded and I’ll stop my reporting there. So you can see right there. I just added in two clips, so I can reply so you can have dialogue about a section of the tape. I could even come back in here and say this part of the recording tends to be a bit better than the rest, and I can post that up there.

What we can do here is, as the as the teacher you can come in and say: okay, I love your emphasis on the words that Pinsky uses here. This part is a very you. You know this is a dramatic part of your production that I appreciate you could add elements where you’re a little bit more critical of your students, but the nice thing is that all of this is here in soundcloud. Once you have an account, you can create the clips, you can annotate the clips.

It makes that whole process of recording and uploading as simple as possible. What’s also nice about soundcloud is it is an online community. You can annotate, you could create groups with your kids. There is a limit to the amount of minutes you can upload. I think it’s around two hours, then you can pay for more. I think, for your purposes, you could pretty much accomplished everything without paying for the number.

One thing that I would have a concern about and that you should be concerned about is the fact that it is an online social network. That’s based on music and it’s very healthy okay, so there are tons of artists that released tracks here, there’s tons of people that are involved, and some of it is questionable. Okay, you cannot ensure that your students will be safe here in these environments. So what I suggest you do is you don’t send them in and have them just hunt down and look for you? Okay, don’t send them in and just look for you and try to find you.

Okay, because I’m a fan of DJ shadow. Okay, I can go in, I can follow DJ, shadows, music. I can listen to a lot of his pieces here. You might not want your students just to go in and find you and basically follow your tracks and mark up your tracks. Okay, the way that you get around that is, you create private lists. You create private tracks, private playlist, you embed those in your website. Then your students never have to come back here to SoundCloud.

Okay. What they’ll do is they’ll, go to your website. They’ll see an embedded clip on your page. That basically looks just like this. It plays like this, it shows the annotation and they can annotate, but they don’t have to go back to sound file. So, in a nutshell, that’s how now that we’ve created a clip and made it private, that’s how we annotate a clip. If you want to come back at any point and figure out how to do this, I basically put together a tutorial will be sharing that the instructions on how to get there, but we have a tutorial.

That’s set up showing you how to do all of this. On the website, I’ve set up for some of these directions. I show some of the standards that are involved and down below. I show screen cat captures on how to do this on an iPad, so this is basically exactly what we’ll be looking for when we use soundcloud with our students and use it for annotation purposes.