Podcasting and My Classroom

In order to create the 4 minute podcast that I made about little Sophia, I would need a month of class days to search for or create clips, seek permission if necessary, teach how to use Garage Band, draft and revise a script, record and edit the podcasts.  This doesn't even include initial thinking and discussion among the students about the purpose and mood of the podcast as Farkas suggests. 

Let's assume I could use 4 weeks of my 9 week term to produce podcasts.  Here's how I would do it:

• Create a course wiki full of audio clips for which I have already gained permission--images and videos for other tech projects, too.  If students made all the contacts during the quarter, the course would be over before we gained permission.
• Train students to use Garage Band by putting them in groups, giving each group the same 5 audio clips, allowing them to choose their own music and voice overs, and after creating a podcast, comparing theirs with the rest of the class.  Reflect on purpose and mood, creative choices.
• Assign individual Garage Band exercises in which students identify a podcast they admire and then try to replicate part of it. Discuss obstacles and resources, how the medium shaped their experience of expression.
• Teach or revisit research practices.  By this time, we will not have been able to cover any course content, so students will have to generate their own ideas for the podcasts.
• Spend a few days on research.
• Spend a few days writing scripts.
• Spend a week creating the podcasts.
• Spend a week listening to and discussing the podcasts.
• Maybe apply what we learned to a more traditional research task, translating the podcasts into an essay or something to explore the relationship between form and purpose.

In other words, I probably won't be using podcasts well until the magical time when all students are trained in the technology before eighth grade. 

Still in 2007, some of my students don't have computers at home.  While my district is making a commendable effort to get laptops into the hands of 4th graders, the secondary alternative population of students is a high mobility crowd and likely won't have benefited from that early exposure.  And, well, I don't have enough computers to undertake podcasting in the first place.

Gripes aside, I can't wait to try this with my students!  I took on too much with my Sophia podcast. I had so many clips I couldn't even find them all once I dropped them into Garage Band tracks.  Finding the clips really consumed most of the time I had to work on it--and I didn't even seek permission to use the music (for which I will surely go to artists' hell).  At least, the speech clips are public domain, but I had to spend time searching sites to verify that fact, too.  I could have centralized my search around creative commons, but wading through that morass of media seemed like it would take even more time.  My point is, if I want to use podcasts as performances of understanding in my regular curriculum, I believe I'll have to do a lot of this footwork for the students well in advance of the project, leaving for them only enough research to maintain some autonomy and practice the process of verifying/gaining permission.

Resources

Click here to explore a podcasting resource suggested by my Digital Writing professor.  The site has a lot of downloads, but seems pretty comprehensive.

Podomatic

Pod Safe Music Network

Sonic Literacy and Composition Studies

Podcasting and the Classroom Audience

Podcast Creation Guide