Recording and Editing Sound

There was a project that a group of Chapel Forge staff wanted to do to support some of our Spanish-speaking families. They asked me to help to record and produce CDs with vocabulary to support the monthly theme, ABCs. counting etc. I wasn't sure how I would do it. Luckily Ronlyn was at CF when they suggested the project. When I asked her how to do it she mentioned Audacity was a good program to use to record sound. Initially, I was able to use the Microsoft sound recorder (under Accessories on most computers). This was fine until I needed to record segments that were longer than 1 minute. I remembered Ronlyn's suggestion and downloaded the program from the Audacity site. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ . I am not using half of the features but have been very happy with what I have used. The group was very happy with the CDs that resulted.
I used Audacity again for my VoiceThread project. I thought the students would have a hard time coordinating speaking into the microphone on cue. I had them react to the book, The Carrot Seed. I just started Audacity recording on a second computer. It did well in picking up sound. My intent is to edit the sound clips and insert them into the VoiceThread. So far, so good. The students liked to watch the sound pattern change as they spoke. It was very easy to isolate statements that I can associate with different images fom the book. I am getting somewhere!