Free Sound Effects: Nature Sounds : Public Domain Sounds
FindSounds - Search the Web for Sounds
Free Sound Effects
freesound :: home page
Demonstration of Different ways to Play a Sound from a Web Page
VoiceThread
midomi
Search for music by singing or humming part of a song. All you need is a microphone.
Easy Peasy Rich Media - VoiceThreads » CogDogBlog
Soundsnap.com: Find and Share Free Sound Effects and Loops
Brenda's Piano Studio - Online Recital
Talking History
Historical Voices
CEP817 Audio Artifacts Lessons
Using audio narration in elearning » Making Change
WWW FAQs: Why do my MP3 files sound bad in Flash Player?
Explains the sampling rate issues with audio in Flash and provides step-by-step directions to correct it using Audacity and LAME
Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom:: Converting cassettes to mp3 files
Video tutorial on converting cassettes to mp3 using an external USB sound card
The Bamboo Project Blog: Using Voicethread to Create an Online Presentation Portfolio
Interesting idea--using Voicethread to create mini presentations for an online portfolio
Read The Words
Free text-to-speech application that creates mp3s of content from multiple formats. Audio can be shared on a blog as a podcast but not sold commercially. Originally designed to help students with learning disabilities access text more easily.
Musopen - Free Public Domain Classical Music
Sheet music and audio in the public domain. You can hear a random piece or listen to their online radio station too.
IDEA - The International Dialects Of English Archive
Audio primary source collection with international and regional dialects of English. Intended primarily for actors learning to imitate an accent, but could have other educational uses too.
elearninglive.com » Captivate Audio Output Settings Comparison - Part One - Encoding Bitrate
Results of an experiment on the encoding bitrate for Captivate. Mark Siegriest is trying to find the best audio settings to balance sound quality and file size.
The most surprising finding in this is that at the lowest bitrates, the file size actually went up, not down. 32kbps was the smallest file size in his sampling.
So basically from what I can see there is no point in ever going below 32kbps as you’re gaining filesize and losing quality.
Voicethread 4 Education » home
Wiki collection of resources and examples for using Voicethread for education purposes. Also includes some best practices and professional development examples.
Purple Planet Music
Incidental music licensed CC-By
The Educational Audio & Video Library | Open Culture
Collection of audio and video for education. Includes audio books, podcasts, music, selected YouTube videos, and university content
Tips for Writing an Effective Audio Script
Suggestions for writing how people talk and creating audio scripts that don't sound stiff and are clear
The Online Communicator: Writing for Audio
How to write scripts to be read aloud, primarily when providing scripts for professional voice talent. A little dated (talking about faxing scripts), but some good things to remember if someone else will read your script
Donald Clark Plan B: Brilliant 35 studies in media and learning
Great summary of research points on our perceptions of media with implications for using media effectively for learning. For example, audio quality matters a lot, but video quality can be low and still effective. Large, wide screens are preferred over higher quality images on smaller screens.
35 psychological studies into the human reaction to media all point towards the simple proposition that people react towards media socially even though, at a conscious level, they believe it is not reasonable to do so. They can't help it. In short, people think that computers are people, which makes e-learning work.
As long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules, we will accept it. Read that last part again, 'as long as a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules'. If the media technology fails to conform to these human expectations - we will very much not accept it.
Writing For Multimedia: Script Guidelines
Tips for writing for multimedia, including specifics for writing audio scripts and software tutorials
Tutorials - Audacity Wiki
Collection of tutorials for Audacity
Langwitches » Digital Storytelling Part VIII- Audacity
Tips for using Audacity for digital storytelling, personalizing a story with the author's voice and sparking the audience's imagination