Ed Tech Ideas

One of my 4^th grade classes is learning about electricity and magnetism in one of their Foss Science units and they are getting into Morse Code. I thought we’d get a first-hand feel of how the Morse Code alphabet works so here’s what I did. I first played them the Morse Code alphabet video (which you can find in my Vodpod section on the left side of this page) and then had each of them do a search to find the Morse Code alphabet (you can also print it out to save time – my way saved paperJ).  They then each opened up Audacity and recorded either their name or a question, using their voices for the dots and dashes. They then exported the sound as a WAV and brought it into PowerPoint to make a finished product that they can share with their classmates.  The classroom teacher is obviously teaching them more about the history of how Morse Code was developed and the students all know that the code was not created by human voices being recorded onto computers.

My lab was filled with sounds of beep, beeeeeeeep, beep, but they really took to the project and have a better understanding of the way the Morse Code works.