Learning the World

Audio recording tools for Moodle are something that’s come up several times on campus. English and foreign languages faculty would love to be able to use such a tool with students; in English they’d use it to work on student’s inflections and readings of poetry, while foreign languages would use it as part of spoken language critques.

I experimented with using NanoGong to do this, but unfortunately it was just too unstable; the Java applet running it refused to save files on two of the three computers I tried it on … including computers on which it had worked.

COVCELLL has created the audio recording assignment that works with Moodle 1.9. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, and would love to hear from anyone who has.

Here’s my test of audio/video screen capture using Camstudio, in which I use Google to find Waldo.

This was done on a Windows XP machine running Camstudio 2.0.  The audio was recorded using a Logitech Desktop Microphone. The final video uses the Intel Indeo Video 4.5 codec.

The AVI video full-screen, 1.05 minutes long and 7.46 MB in size.

Observations: The video recorded well and plays back fine in Windows Media Player. Embedding it on a webpage using PowerPress (the video below) was more problematic. IE 6 will play the video because it recognizes the AVI file type. Firefox 3 will not.

The video looks good and the sound quality is fine. I don’t think the inability to play AVI files in Firefox is a show stopper, and we can always convert AVIs to some other format later on if we need to.

• Download the video (AVI format)