Fluent readers develop over time with plenty of practice. Many students (and parents) mistakenly equate fluent reading with fast reading. Teachers must work to help students and parents understand that reading quickly with little expression or in a monotone voice is not fluent reading (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.4.B). One way transliteracy skills can assist in this process is through the use of digital audio recording. There are many digital audio recording tools teachers can use to help students develop into more fluent readers. Read the rest of this entry…

Aiden was recently asked to record some sample fluency passages for preservice teachers at The University of Akron to use for practicing 3-Minute Reading Assessments. We used the AudioBoo app to record the passages and post to the cloud. Below you’ll find the embedded audio clips. Teachers could easily use a similar method to post student clips for sharing with parents or other teachers on their team.

The source of the passages is located here. You can also find the teacher scoring sheets for each passage.

Remember listservs? I guess people still use them, but they really seem so 1990’s to me. Regardless, I’m still on a couple different listservs, and from time to time, there IS good information that comes through the barrage of emails that fill my inbox. Very often, the people who are emailing the listserv are looking for help, assistance and/or answers to their questions. I can appreciate this. Occasionally, I take time to write a decent email and respond back to those questions. I hate doing it though. I wish these listserv people would move their “conversations” to a more open forum, like Twitter, a Facebook group, or possibly even Google+, but many of them are not ready for that, or just not interested. I hope that changes.

Until then, I have very little choice in how I add my voice to the conversation other than writing an email back to the listserv. I took that rather antiquated approach to professional learning and sharing this morning when I wrote a decent email to the people in the NAEYC Technology & Young Children Interest Forum about how I am using iOS devices with young children to take photos and videos. Upon completion, I thought that the information the email contained might be valuable to people outside the listserv, so I’m sharing it here.

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I’m trying to find the simplest way to produce an audio only file from the Screenflow file of a Skype conference call. Right now, I grab the screencast, which is usually 2 tracks; Screen/computer audio and the audio only of my USB mic. From there, I level out the 2 audio tracks and export as a .mov file. I then open the .mov in Quicktime 7 and export SOUND to AIFF, which gives me an .aif file. Then I import the .aif into GarageBand and then export as a .m4a file.

This seems all convoluted…is there an easier way? In the end, I can’t even find where I can export to a .mp3 file. Your suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

I’ve been working on authoring a Flash-based learning object using Articulate Engage for one of my grad classes over the past couple of days. During the development phase, I knew I wanted to include a couple of brief video segments to provide multi-modal opportunities to present the content. The one thing I wasn’t crazy about was using my voice for the narration. Sure I could, but the fact of the matter is I’m not really that crazy about listening to my voice over and over again during the editing process. As an alternative, I decided to experiment with using Text-to-Speech software.

For those who need a little background, Wikipedia provides this information about Text-to-Speech (TTS):

A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech…An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1980s.

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