The NL-based music teacher Andrew Mer­cer has cre­ated a new learn­ing resource called the Video Guide to Audac­ity, which guides stu­dents and teach­ers in learn­ing to record and edit sound with the open source soft­ware Audac­ity.

Audac­ity is pow­er­ful, intu­itive and, per­haps best of all, free. Being open source, teach­ers can legally install it on any school com­puter and stu­dents can down­load it for free at home. Unfor­tu­nately, the avail­abil­ity of edu­ca­tion­ally sound resources to help teach­ers and stu­dents learn to use Audac­ity is lim­ited. This was the inspi­ra­tion behind the cre­ation of the Video Guide to Audac­ity.

At the heart of the Video Guide to Audac­ity is a com­pre­hen­sive col­lec­tion of videos, which take learn­ers from the basics of record­ing and edit­ing sound to high-level cre­ative tech­niques. The Video Guide to Audac­ity is self-contained, easy to use and can be incor­po­rated into exist­ing music programs.

Video Guide to Audac­ity has three com­po­nents: Tuto­ri­als, activ­i­ties, and projects. Tuto­ri­als give learn­ers spe­cific instruc­tion on how to use Audac­ity. Activ­i­ties pro­vide guided oppor­tu­ni­ties to use Audac­ity to prac­tice con­cepts learned in the tuto­ri­als while pro­vid­ing instruc­tors with robust means of eval­u­a­tion. Projects are open-ended oppor­tu­ni­ties to use Audac­ity to syn­the­size the con­cepts learned by engag­ing in cre­ative projects. All con­tent as well as video tran­scripts are pro­vided in text for­mat to accom­mo­date learn­ers who pre­fer the text medium.

As stu­dents work though the Video Guide to Audacity’s care­fully designed and doc­u­mented out­comes, instruc­tors are pro­vided with a com­pre­hen­sive resource guide and robust eval­u­a­tion tools to ensure an accu­rate eval­u­a­tion of stu­dent progress through the outcomes.

Go to www.MakeAndBreakEducation.com for a pre­view of the Video Guide to Audac­ity.