Using Audacity and Photostory in the French Classroom

Qu'est-ce que c'est L'audacity?  L'audace?

I probably should open by saying, "Pardon my French."

I recently did some work with a grade nine French class in Audacity, an open-source sound editing software package.  The teacher had given the students a topic on which they were to create a short French dialogue/skit.  The skit involved incorporating sound effects, so they also listed these in their scripts.  My involvement began after the scripts were already complete.

First, I showed the students how to search for the sound effects they needed using findsounds.com.  After they had assembled these, we looked at the process of assembling sounds and their own recorded voices to create an audio play.  Learning these skills took a period, but I probably covered more ground than was needed for their modest creations.  The material I covered can be found in these tutorials.  Login as "guest" and navigate to Section 4:  Creating a Radio Play or Radio Ad.

In the second period students worked with their own material, recording their dialogues, adding sound effects, and rendering the final product as an MP3 file.

Telling a Photostory

After the experience with Audacity, I introduced the same teacher to the Idea that Photostory could also be used within the French classroom.  Shortly thereafter, she gave her students the option of doing a biography of a classmate as a visual narrative within Photostory.  The students who chose this option collected photos of the classmates they  had chosen as well as other images associated with that person (favourite musicians, favourite foods, ...).  They then imported these images into Photostory and recorded a voice narration over each photo to tell the life stories of their classmates.

Once this process was done, they exported the final product as a multimedia movie slideshow.

Both Audacity and Photostory are available as free downloads, which means students can access them at home as well as at school.  And both are excellent ways to provide students another means of practicing their French oral skills.