Podcasts in my classroom

Last week, we were able to finish all of the recording of our podcasts. The recording was not hard. Audacity was very easy to use for recording and editing. Today, I used the website that I mentioned in my previous podcasting post to publish one of the podcasts to the web. The podcasting booklet was very helpful and easy to follow. Publishing should not have been very hard, but I ran into some difficulty when I was using Podomatic. For some reason, the site would not let me click to start my account. What should have taken 5 minutes took about an hour. However, I finally finished and you can listen to one of my 4th grade podcasts here. When I followed the link, I again had issues with the website, so I had to click download instead of play. Then I could listen to it.

When I do podcasts again next year, I will test Podomatic before I use it. If I have the same issues, I will find another publishing site instead. Any suggestions for other publishing sites to use would be appreciated.

The podcasting booklet had many suggestions for editing and publishing. There is so much that you can do to your podcasts like adding music, images, cleaning up the sound, and more. Since this was my first podcast, I just stuck to the basics, but I will play around with it some more before we make podcasts next year so that I can walk the students through the editing and publishing stages. I definitely think that my students will need help with these stages.

I did ask the 4th graders for feedback last week. Almost all of the students said that they enjoyed the podcasting book report more than traditional book reports. They said that it was nice to work in a group because if you were unsure of something, there were others to help clarify. They also liked speaking instead of writing. Although they did have to write the interview questions and answers; spelling, grammar, and neatness did not really matter as long as they knew what it said. They enjoyed asking questions of the main character instead of writing a traditional summary. They said that they hope to do podcasting again next year at some point. I made sure to pass this news on to the 5th grade teachers and offered my help if they needed it.

All in all, this was a positive experience that I would do again, although I will not wait until the end of the year to do it.