Boys and Girls Club Visit 3

Last Monday was our third and final visit to the Boys and Girls Club, when the 7th grade girl I had been working with for the past two visits arrived, we went right to the computers.  Once we loaded up the flash drive onto the computer and found her narrative document, we began to prepare for recording.  First, we read through the document once to make corrections and allow for easier readability.  We also changed some parts to make it more clear to the reader what meaning the student was trying to evoke.  Once we had made all the necessary changes, the student read through her narrative twice to practice before recording.  Although she was still unsure of her reading, I encouraged her to try it out and told her we could try multiple times.  For the first two recordings she had read it all the way through in one segment.  She stumbled over a couple of sentences and hesitated at points, so she wanted to try again.  When I hit play from the beginning by accident, I noticed her face freeze.  I asked her what was wrong and why she stopped speaking, she began to laugh and say that she thought her voice sounded strange over recording.  I explained to her that I felt the same way both times when I did my Digital Story for English 383 and Expository Writing.  It seems to be a common trait that no one likes hearing their own voice over a recording because how we perceive our voice when we are speaking is different from how machinery records it and is different from how others hear it.  I suggested recording from a different approach.  I separated her narrative into shorter segments and told her to just read one segment at a time and to then stop.  She recorded in this manner so that when she did stumble over a word or misread it, we could erase the segment and start it over again, without having to record everything over.  Throughout reading she maintained an even pace.  Her reason for doing this was because she didn't think her narrative was long enough, but in the end it made for an easy-to-understand recording.  Although it may seem like a lot of work for a project that isn't even for school, the girl I was working with seemed still interested in the project and continuing to the next phase of her "Pearl of Wisdom" digital story in which she will add images to her voice.