8th Grade Social Studies Podcast Episodes 2 and 3!

Photo credit: Nicolas Solop

Another month brings us 2 more podcasts from 8th grade! This time around the 8th Grade Social Studies podcast tried a Boys and Girls teams for the podcast. The idea was to have the teams compete to create the best podcast. Unfortunately several technical glitches got in the way, including a microphone not working during the first recording session for the girls team. We continue to learn and grow with each episode. Some of the sound leveling problems from Episode 1 persist as the students learn to speak into the microphones directly and why this is an issue. We opened up the editing suite, Adobe Audition, together in my classroom on the projector and went through how we can boost certain tracks and edit the EQ levels of the Master Track. We explored plug in options and settled on using an Adobe Audition plug in that’s specifically for speaking voices. These early episodes are rough cuts but the team has high hopes for the next few episodes, including a decrease in turn around time.

As we go along, more of the post production editing will be handed over to the students.  Adobe Audition is a great editing program, it is a professional level program like much of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of Apps; however it is intuitive and there are a lot of YouTube videos that explain how to do almost anything you could want. An example is I used a YouTube video to learn how to create a “Multitrack Mixdown” in MP3 form so we can upload the files to the internet. I am new to Adobe Audition, I generally use Cubasis or StudioOne, and while editing audio is mostly the same from app to app, where things are specifically can change. YouTube is a great source for “how to” tutorials for almost every app available. In this vein I created a YouTube tutorial for the students who will begin to edit on their own. The video shows steps to set up the basic Podcast and how to set the plug ins that work best for our purposes.

I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoy making it!

-Mr. W

Episode 2, the Girls team.

Episode 3, the Boys team.