Dear Twenty-first Century Friends

Using AI tools to cleanup and enhance audio narration.

The instructional strategy used to immerse students into the 17th Century Village of Hammersmith was a detailed letter of welcoming written by Elizabeth and Samuel. Communicating important historical background information and key historical terms like Company of Undertakers and indentured servant would be crucial to students understanding the origins of the Saugus Iron Works. One obstacle was the varied reading level of 5th grade learners. Students were simply unable to decode and comprehend the full text.

Teacher creators suggested providing audio narration. Students were having success using other classroom audio and text interactive modules. We recruited a native speaker from England and recorded their narration. The original unit featured a Flash-based (SWF) interactive for students to control the audio.

Enhance Speech Feature

The original Flash narration was captured by Quicktime and then processed with Adobe Podcast to enhance and remove background hiss. Adobe Podcast uses AI to accomplish the task and provided a downloadable file (WAV format). The modernized SIW Letter uses the latest web-standards.