This week we took another facet of Adobe for a spin – Audition. The sound editing software that took me right back to broadcasting editing with Professor Lingle in the 90’s. Only we didn’t have anything this easy to use. We had digital editing equipment that had dials to key in to places where you wanted to cut and splice tracks together. Then again, I also used a hot wax machine at my first job in the newspaper industry to paste together the pages, so there you go. Things change. Fortunately sound stays the same.
In keeping with my subject matter for this semester I chose to interview one of the community members who participated in the reconfiguration committee. These folks spent over a year looking at the idea of transitioning our district from the current junior high and 10-12 high school to middle schools and a 9-12 high school. After delving into all the research, best practices and so forth, they decided it was the best idea for our students in the South Kitsap School District. 
On a side note, the woman I interview just had her 6th grader graduate from elementary a week ago, so she’s knee deep in how this all plays out because it will directly impact her children. Having some skin in the game really does make you think of things differently.
I did an interview with her, which ended up being audio only (because my phone didn’t have enough storage after my daughter going to Prom and graduating from high school the same week because I hadn’t downloaded all the pictures and video yet). From that interview I selected a clip I thought followed many of the guidelines given to us in our tutorial readings. It tells a short story. It has a definite point. And more importantly, it’s kind of fun. You can tell she’s a real person dealing with this whole tween thing so common among kids in the middle school age group.
For our 30-45 second tutorial clip I did have to edit some of her natural pauses down a bit to get it to come under the length requirement. I also had to edit my own introduction and restructure it a bit when I found I talked too much! It was more important to showcase her story in this case.
The counting tutorial was interesting too. It was so much easier to move around audio using this program, and far more intuitive than using the programs and equipment I’ve had to previously to accomplish the same thing. Finally, an Adobe program that is actually fun to use!
So, without further ado, here are the four tutorial audio clips including both raw material and the finished product for each tutorial.
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