Celebrate this Week - Podcasts

I’m joining up with Ruth Ayres for her weekly link-up, Celebrate This Week. Check out all of the posts linked up at her blog HERE. Thanks for starting this, Ruth!

This week I’m celebrating my students and our new learning. I’ve been intrigued by the concept of podcasting and have wondered how to incorporate it into my classroom. Talking to my tech director, I decided to start small. My students are already familiar with the app Audioboo. I wanted them to use it as the platform to record themselves in a group setting. Wondering what we should record, I thought of the new challenge John Schumacher and Colby Sharp are undertaking – the Geisel Challenge.

I shared the Geisel winners and honors from 2006 and 2007 with my three reading classes. Splitting into groups, kids read the book, wrote a short script, and recording their “podcast.” I’ve embedded the group of them below.

I loved trying this out with my students this week. I think there are a lot of possibilities for recording our voices in the classroom and can’t wait to explore more. Ultimately, I’d love to do two things – one, I think it would be awesome for a student to summarize our learning each day. It’s hard to catch kids up when they are absent and have missed the discussions that took place in the mini-lessons in our workshops. If someone could summarize what we did, maybe anyone who was absent could listen to that upon returning and feel like they gained some information from the day before.

Two, I think it would be amazing to have a spot to record podcasts of book reviews that the students could access and look for reading recommendations. I’ve done this before with Audioboo and QR codes. I’m debating if I want to do this in a different way or what would work best for the students. This is a conversation we will need to explore more in our classroom.

Have a great weekend!