I am taking an animation class at school and the teacher doesn't really help out that many people. I just have a few questions:
How do you make people walk?
How do you put your own voice in the animation?
and lastly:
I can't seem to get timeline effects to work.

I consider myself to be an animator of some sorts. I'll see what i can do to help.
How to make people walk:
It can be a rather simple thing to do, but I onlt make stick men walk. I found 2 ways to make someone walk. The first is the simplist. First, make your stick man into a symbol. This can be done by high-lighting the whole of the stick man and right-clicking it, the click on "convert into symbol" Call it walking, and make sure it's a movie clip. Now double-click on the stick man. Using Frame-by-Frame, you move their legs inwards, much like how a pair of scissors closed. Then when the legs are almost touching, open them out, again, much like how a pair od scissors opens. If your having trouble with making them open at the same speed, just copy all your frames (make sure they are only the ones that involve the closing part), the paste them, the highlight the second half of the frames, right-click, and choose "reverse frames". Then press ctrl+enter and look at him walk! You an apply this to the arms as well to create a fuller walk. Creating it as a symbol creates it as an infinite loop, so you don;t need to copy and paste the frames all the time.
If you were thinking of step over step walking, I can teach you that aswell, all you hae to do is ask.
How to upload your voice onto flash:
Very simple. First, record your voice. Then save as an MP3 file (the sound recorder found on most computers saves as a file that can be used on flash), next go to file and then import. Choose import to library. Now choose the file with your voice on. The sound file is in your library, go to it (normally found in the right) and drag your sound file onto that white box in the middle. Nothing is on the screen, but on the time line, you'll see a blue dash, click on frame 30 and press f6. You should see that dash become a lot less straight. Play the animation, and you should hear yourself. If you don't, turn up the volume or speak louder when recording your voice.
Timeline effects:
I think the time line effects you were talking about are the tweens. Tweens are effects that do something for you. there are three tweens:
Classic tween: This basiclly moves shapes, makes them change in size and can change colour.
Shape Tween: This changes shapes. You coiuld change a square into a circle and make it change colour. Too grate a change (several lines and shapes at the same time) will result in massive lagg.
Motion Tween: A powerful tween that allows to create amazing effects such as blur, etc. but is very unflexible. Mostly for advanced animators (but not limited to).
All you have to do to use these is to (lets use classic tween) create a square. then click on frame 20 and press f6. Move that square is any other place you like in frame 20. Now right click frame 15 (or any frame between 1-19) and click on classic tween. You should see the frames go to a sort of pestal blue and an arrow pointing right. Press enter and see what happens.
I do hope this helped. If you need anymore help with flash, pm me and I'll see if I can help.

Animations are made up of frames so if yo draw the character you made slowly moving his leg frame by frame then play it all back then character should walk
Recording voices is simple if you have a microphone record your voice use an editing software then import your voices into the animation
I'm not sure how to help you with the time lines sorry