New Audacity QuickStart Guide

15th July 2008

posted in digitalstorytelling |

The advisory council for our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project had a good planning meeting this morning and working session this afternoon, in which we updated many of the handouts we use during our 2.5 day educator workshops. Our summer workshop takes place next week, 21-23 July in Oklahoma City. These materials are Creative Commons Attribution-Only licensed, so feel free to use and/or make derivative works from any of these materials if they are helpful to you. Updated tutorials / handouts from today (in PDF format) include:

A new 4 page Audacity QuickStart guide, which replaces the 2 page version we’ve used for the past 2 years but has been missing a LOT of important steps, information, tips and techniques.
An Olympus WS-110 Digital Recorder QuickStart Guide (which replaces a text-only webpage version)
A 1 page Project Planning Guide which we are going to introduce on day 1 along with the Digital Storytelling Map we’ve used in the past.

All these documents are available in both PDF and Open Office (editable) formats on the Handouts page of the Google Site I setup for our project. I REALLY like this “file cabinet” feature of Google Sites. It seems ideally suited for archiving and sharing workshop handouts. The following option in the “sharing” area of Google Sites really strikes me as mind-boggling when we remember how DIFFICULT it “used to be” to use a program like Microsoft Frontpage and a FTP program to publish content to the web!

Thanks to LifeHacker’s post “Merge multiple PDF’s with Combine PDFs 2.1″ I discovered Monkeybread Software’s free “Combine PDFs” Macintosh application. I was able to use it to combine multiple PDFs I created using NeoOffice (the free Mac port of OpenOffice) to create our Audacity handout, and after our updated PhotoStory3 handout is available I’ll create a single, downloadable PDF file which includes all our participant handouts.

One of our other hard working committee members is finalizing a completely re-created PhotoStory3 handout. We’ve been using David Jakes’ outstanding PhotoStory3 Tutorial for the past two years, but we are using the program a little differently in combination with Audacity, and our handout needs to reflect those differences.

I still need to create a handout for Ning website video publishing procedures, and add links to iMovie tutorials and resources for our Mac users. Other than that, I think all our handouts for next week are ready to go.

Technorati Tags:
audacity, photostory, tutorial, imovie, storytelling, digitalstorytelling, oklahoma, cov, cov08

On this day..

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On July 15th, 2008, Pat said:

Thanks so much for the Audacity Quick Start Guide. I have had Audacity for a few months but have been too overwhelmed to try it. This motivates me to give it a try.

2 On July 15th, 2008, Lorna Costantini said:

I am happy to see the use of the voice recorder. Simple light and goes any where. I did find it important to attach a separate mic or leave the voice recorder in one place. Thanks for putting together an excellent set of instructions. Sure makes it easier for a beginner.

3 On July 22nd, 2008, Miguel Guhlin said: