Presenter: Denis Vincek

Title: Audacity – Bringing Students Closer Together during the Pandemics through Voice Connection

Duration: 15 min.

Abstract: Communication between students and teachers in the e-teaching environment during the pandemics has been overwhelmingly reduced to written communication on platforms such as Yammer, Loomen or MS Teams. Students themselves also mostly use the written words and photographs in their private communication. Through video lesson, teachers learned about the free digital sound processing software Audacity. This also allowed the students to further develop their digital competencies by using sound recorders on their mobile phones, sending audio files via e-mail, and converting them into an appropriate format to create a radio show in Audacity and hear the voices of their peers in the final product. A survey was conducted among the third-grade and eighth-grade students at the Ante Kovačić Elementary School in Zlatar. The results obtained after producing five radio shows indicate that voice really brings students closer together and that students hearing each other’s voices helps them get over the quarantine more easily.

Biography: Denis Vincek is a school librarian mentor at the Ante Kovačić Elementary in Zlatar. He has held 30 lectures organized by the Croatian Education and Teacher Training Agency and 30 domestic and international talks, three of which were at the MIPRO conferences. His main area of research interest is Media Education. He mentors students who publish the printed and digital school newspapers, and students who record and edit radio shows, radio dramas, and films of different genre. For the past nine years, he has managed the national project for encouraging reading: "Čitajmo zajedno – čitajmo naglas: zaboravljene knjige" (engl. Let's read together – let's read out loud: the forgotten books). He is a member of the workgroup responsible for the comprehensive curriculum reform conducted by the Ministry of Science and Education of Republic of Croatia.

Contact:

Denis Vincek
Ante Kovačić Elementary School, Zlatar, Croatia
gsm: +385 98223746
email: denis.vincek7@gmail.com