November 28

ELA Common Post: Developing a Sound Recording (Layering effects in)

One of the creative types of projects you can do in ELA is to develop either a video or audio recording and include sound effects. There’s an assignment like this in both ELA A10 and A30.

You could take the ELA A30 Poetry Project Assignment where you have to pick a Canadian poem and record an oral performance reading it with emotion and plays on sounds, but add some soft background music or other sound effects into the file, for one overall polished creation. It demonstrates creativity, attention to detail, and also that you took the project to a developed/polished level, rather than developing just the basics.

You can use a video making program to add in some quiet background music or one or two sound effects. Remember to use these extras like you use salt & pepper – just a little goes a long way!

There’s also a Poetry Performance to develop in ELA A10 – it’s just a voice recording of a poem spoken and performed, but again you can enhance it by adding sound layers to it. What extra type of mood could you create by different sound choices or music?

Note: Be sure to check at the bottom of the blog post to confirm how to save/submit your project. It must be exported to be shared.

A Guide to Understanding how to Use the Media Types to Layer, Level, and Stagger Your Media Files.

Resources to help support you: 

  1. Sound Effects Websites:
    1. Pixabay: includes music, sound effects, pictures and video. Free to download.
    2. Bensound.com: Another website that includes Royalty Free music, so long as you source the site.
    3. EpidemicSound.com: Another website with both sound effects as well as music. This one also requires a subscription, but if there’s a song/sound effect you badly need, we can talk about purchasing it. (There’s a free trial period.)
    4. Artlist.io: This is another website with instrumental music of different genres and sound. Royalty Free
    5. Musicbed.com: If you’re looking for background music for your project, there are lots of categories and “moods” of music posted here. Many are instrumental, which would be appropriate for a video project. Let me know if you’re interested in music here – we could get a school account to access it. 
  2. Video and Image Files: Creative Commons
    1. Pexels.com: Free creative commons images and videos to download
    2. Canva has both free images as well as templates you can use to create the visuals for your video.
    3. Burst also includes free-to-download images.
    4. Unsplash.com: website with free-to-use images
    5. Audio File Online Converter: Sometimes, the audio files you want to use aren’t in a file format a program will recognize. This online site will let you load your audio file and convert it to a file type that’s usable in your program, like mp3.
      1. This website even lets you use videos and will convert a visual file into simply an audio file. Cool!

  1. Video Making Software/Programs:
    1. iMovieForWindows: can search/download the program. It will be in a very familiar format to what you’ve used before.
    2. Animotica: This is a free video making program from the Windows App Store. You can download it on your school device and it allows you to create an image file (just a black screen for background) that you can then attach your layers of sound files onto.
    3. iMovie: Some people have (surprisingly) successfully developed their Poetry Project on their iPhones. Use a program you’re comfortable with and have access to.

For ELA A30 Projects:

 

 


Preparing to Export and Submit your Video Project:

Regardless of which program you’re using, you can’t share the Project without Exporting it and Saving it in a file type that can be shared.

  • What Not To Do: You can’t just share your Project. To open the project, the computer needs to access the additional files included in the project and that only works on the original device it was developed on. Avoid this mistake.
  • What To Do: Save/Export your project as a Video. That means the program saves all the sound pieces and files together into one single file that can be played on another device. It will also export the video into a playable file type, like Mp4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 30

ELA MLA Citation Guide & Links

If you pursue post-secondary education, the odds are you’ll have to develop a piece of writing that requires in-text citations and a Works Cited page. Here are some resources to use as a guide for that:

In-text citation guide:

  • author and page #
  • anonymous authors
  • text from an anthology or collection
  • multiple authors
  • internet sources

Citing non-print or sources from the Internet

With more and more scholarly work being posted on the Internet, you may have to cite research you have completed in virtual environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL’s Evaluating Sources of Information resource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source in your Works Cited.

Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers, but often, these sorts of entries do not require a page number in the parenthetical citation. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:

  • Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).
  • You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.
  • Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com or Forbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.

Works Cited page – basic guidelines

Basic rules

  • Begin your Works Cited page on a separate page at the end of your research paper. It should have the same one-inch margins and last name, page number header as the rest of your paper.
  • Label the page Works Cited (do not italicize the words Works Cited or put them in quotation marks) and center the words Works Cited at the top of the page.
  • Double space all citations, but do not skip spaces between entries.
  • Indent the second and subsequent lines of citations by 0.5 inches to create a hanging indent.
  • List page numbers of sources efficiently, when needed. If you refer to a journal article that appeared on pages 225 through 250, list the page numbers on your Works Cited page as 225-250. Note that MLA style uses a hyphen in a span of pages.
  • If you’re citing an article or a publication that was originally issued in print form but that you retrieved from an online database, you should type the online database name in italics. You do not need to provide subscription information in addition to the database name.

Easybib Citation Maker: this website can be helpful for easily making your Works Cited page.

 

June 25

What’s on my bookshelf? Check online to see!

There are a lot of cool books on the shelves of the bookcase at the back of the room. Most are separated to fit their best course or genre that they relate to, but it can be deceiving, since many overlap and fit a number of high school ELA courses.

To help you see what your options are and decide,  I’ve created online shelves in GoodReads. At the link below, you can skim through and read summaries to every book on my shelf and get a sense of its topic, rather than judging by colour.

Curious about a book? Ask me about it!

GoodReads Shelves Ms Waldner

You’ll see on the left of the page a number of Shelves – click through them to skim books that apply and are potential choices within your class.

 

February 28

ELA B30 Developing Essay Writing Skills – Transitions Between Paragraphs

Some of the basics of developing the typical keyhole essay have been established for you all.Image result for transitions We’re able, then, to focus on more advanced and specific elements of developing your essay writing. In particular, many of you can improve how smoothly a reader flows through your writing, more easily following your line of thinking between the paragraphs. To improve this, you must develop stronger transitions between your paragraphs that guide the reader through the parts of your argument and shows the connections between the paragraph ideas. 

Many of you have developed a strength in writing good topic sentences.

What you must do now is develop the transitions that precede them to link one paragraph idea to the next.

Some essay samples are provided below.
They range in quality of whether they have these transitions between paragraphs. Some are basic/redundant (first, second, third), some miss these transitions entirely and only have topic sentences, while others have developed both the topic sentence and the transition to accompany it. See if you can rate them in order of basic to advanced.

A:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

B:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

E:

 

September 7

ELA Sept 7/16 Testing Your Skills Identifying Poetic Devices

We review poetic devices found in poems in ELA and often-times the poems hold little interest for you outside of the context of the course topic. In this sample, these phrases are taken from popular songs you may be aware of.

The challenge is to a) see if you can identify the figurative device used, b) see if you can identify the song or artist as well, but also c) recognize that poetry and music are much the same and the same plays on word sounds and meanings are used by artists every day!

Here’s the audio of the Figurative Devices Test. You can use the paper copy to watch for which device is included in each. Of the 40 examples given, see if you can get an accuracy score of over 35 correct!

The audio is 12 minutes long.

Choose which handout you want to use: Level 1 (gives hints) or Level 2 (has no hints)

 

Image result for figurative devices