Your students just recorded a poem with Audacity, and they swear that they saved the MP3 file in the right location, but they don’t understand why the program is asking them to save it again. What’s happening?
This is a common experience with Audacity, Photo Story, Windows Movie Maker and many media-creation tools such as Photoshop, Premiere, Flash, etc. What happens is that Audacity (we’ll use that as an example representing all of these types of programs) wants you to save a “project” file where you can keep editing your work in ADDITION TO the final audio (or movie) file that gets posted on your website or played using Windows Media Player.
If students are simply creating a one-off recording of what they did in science this week, then they should just create the MP3 file and not bother saving the project file. As long as the MP3 file is created first, it’s okay to close Audacity without saving the project file.
Photo Story and Movie Maker are a little different. With those programs you SHOULD save the project file. This allows you to return to the editing of the photo story or movie and make minor changes or simply create a final version that can be played on a different device. For example, let’s say a group of students makes a video of their Reader’s Theater performance. They add opening titles, closing credits, and some music. They save it to show the classs on the SMART Board. You like it so much that you want to put it on your website. The problem is that it’s such a huge video file; what can you do?
Because your students saved the PROJECT, you can open the video project in editing mode, and go to the final step to export the video as a smaller file size. This is a really convenient way to modify files for use on the web.