A Great Product for all ages...
Podcasting is a great way for any teacher who has a desktop or laptop to allow students a variety of ways to differentiate with product. The free program Audacity make it easy and most laptops have built in microphones and cameras. Teaching students as early as Kindergarten is feasible. When listening to the podcast produced by Willowcast at Radio Willoweb, they broadcast lower elementary students podcasts. I like how they were posted to the web making their casts authentic and available to all who wish to listen.
Fontichiaro (2007) gives a variety of uses for podcasting. One tool I like is having students record their writing. For years, I have used "sayback" (the reading of your rough draft to another person or small group) as one tool to help students hear what they have written so they can hear their mistakes. Using podcasts allows even the shyest student the advantage of hearing their words and in turn hear their mistakes as they listen to what they have written. I also like the idea of having older students read lower level books for podcasts that can be used with kindergarten or other struggling readers. This is much less expensive than buying books on tape or mp3 players. Allowing 4th to 6th grade readers read lower level books for podcasting is great to help them develop their oral reading fluency, oral expression, and public speaking. I used “kindergarten buddies” 25 years ago for that purpose and now they can make recording easily to develop a wonderful listening library for their school. This too is an authentic product.
Nancy Keane's podcasts are good examples of book talks; I would have liked them better the music was a little less eerie. Her voice was interesting with the first few I listened to but then it started sounding redundant. I skipped half way down and the music and voice was still the same.
I really enjoyed listening to the students at Willocast as well! They were so cute to listen to and I was very impressed at how “professional” they sounded. Your idea of having students record their writing is great. In fact, I think there are students that could probably tell their story better than they could write it. After telling it, they could then go back and listen to themselves and then proceed to write the story. I have had many 2nd grade students that could tell me what they wanted to write but when they sat down to write their papers, they drew a blank.
ReplyDeleteFinally, your idea of having older students read stories to for younger students using a podcast was great. My second graders had reading buddies who were in the 5th grade. They always looked forward to getting together and reading with them each Friday. How nice it would be to have these podcasts used during center time each day. Then they could “meet” with their buddy more than just once a week!