Wonder Woman Gone Country
Every week in English Nine Honors, students are given a set of ten SAT preparatory vocabulary words. Last week’s words were astute, asylum, atone, atrocity, atrophy, attrition, augment, augur, authentic, austere. They are expected to know and use these words appropriately by the end of the week. One exciting part of getting a new set of words to learn, besides of course learning new words, is our Wednesday vocabulary activity. Students have created bumper stickers, pick up lines, written letters of complaint and recommendation. However, none are as clever as when they are asked to create a country western song about Wonder Woman (yes, the lady with the golden lasso and bracelets). In their groups of four to five, after completing their fantastic composition and practicing for a few moments, the next step was for the students to record their “original” work in Audacity. After saving their recording, students were to take it home and enhance their work. Students exported the files into an MP3 format and voila! We have Wonder Woman Gone Country!
While none of these may be destined to win a Grammy, take a listen and see if you can pick out the vocab words.
Note: Click and drag on the scroll bar in the player below to see all the podcasts. It only displays eight at a time, but there are more if you scroll. You can't click above or below the scroll bar to move it up or down, you must click and drag on the scroll bar itself.
One group (AASCCSAG) also created a background PowerPoint slide that displayed behind them as they sang.
posted by annes @ 2:46 PM
13 Comments:
Awesome activity, you guys. Great use of vocabulary. I found your application of these words to be quite audacious, auspicious and anything but arduous.
Keep it up!
-Dan Maas
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Well, as far as quality goes, I think ours pretty much speaks for itself. But to everyone else, you all did a great job.
Oh. Someone mentioned an invisible jet. I looked this up. Wonder Woman has an invisible jet. Why? Wouldn't it be really hard to find after you park it? What are the benefits of an invisible jet, anyway? You can still see her inside, so its not like it gives you the element of suprise.
Doing my best to attack ideas, and not people, an invisible jet sounds like something a four year old would come up with in a one-up-manship contest.
"I have a hummer."
"I have a private jet."
"I have an invisible jet."
"ooooooohh."
I have used audacity for a while and loved it. But there was not really much I could do to salvage our song without spending hours.
Also, is there a way we can make the podcasts not autoplay on page load?
I've been trying to figure out the autoplay issue - it's not supposed to autoplay with the settings I've given it, yet it is anyway. Unless and until I figure it out, just click the stop button really quickly . . .
Okay, autoplay should be fixed. There was a setting to randomly pick which podcast to be at the top - for some reason choosing that was causing the autoplay problem. By changing it back to most recently uploaded podcast, it fixed it.
Thanks a ton kfisch. It is definitely fixed. Hope I wasn't too picky, but sometimes it played when it was late at night. Thanks again.
What a great idea! A wonderful way to learn vocabulary, learn audacity and create a podcast. I enjoyed hearing the students voices.
How did you get Odeo to display and play all the podcasts in one player?
Darren,
You first have to create a podcast within Odeo and add the audio files you want to that podcast. Assuming you've already done that, log in to your Odeo account:
1. Click on the name of the podcast (under My Podcasts).
2. Click on the Odeo Directory URL link.
3. Then at the top there's a link to embed flash player in your site.
4. Choose the settings you want and copy the html, then paste onto your page.
They certainly didn't make it easy to find . . .
I had a great time with this project. It was definitely...let's go with interesting. I haven't listened to my groups yet though and I'm not sure how it turned out becuase I didn't get the pleasure of being part of the editing process but I'm sure it's as amazing as when we recorded it.
One last note: Ben you are officially my hero.
These were awesome. I am going to try this with my students here at my middle school in Texas. They will die having to sing in front of everyone. That's part of the fun, I guess. Podcasting is such a neat literacy tool to use, and you folks have done it well. Keep up the good work.
It was a very fun activity, even though I had to give up one of my off-hours editing out all the laughing my group did. I edited out 40 seconds of pure laughter. It was also a great learning experience. I had never known how to edit audio clips before. I'll have to play with that some more.
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