Thunder

Today I had my first experience of producing a podcast with students. Ewan McIntosh, who looks just like his picture on his blog, lead a 3 hour session on podcasting with 20 Year 10 MFL students from Thomas Adams School in Wem (Shropshire).

The session started off with Ewan finding out how many of the students knew what a podcast was, surprisingly on 1 pupil admitting to knowing what a podcast was. Don’t students listen to Radio1 anymore? It was now time to explain what a podcast was and what we were planning to do.

The plan was to produce a 10 minute radio show in French and then to podcast it.

The class was split up into smaller groups of less that 4 students, one group contained 2 students and they were the producer/editor. The other groups were to be the reporters.

The next task was to decide on what the topics were for the individual segments, one group decided to do a telephone conversation - the phone was later connected via bluetooth to the mac to transfer the recorded conversation. An excellent use of a mobile phone.

Each group was then given 40 minutes to plan their slot for the show, while this was happening the editor/produce was given a very quick guided tour of Garageband which they would be using to produce the podcast.

One group wanted to work on the planning collaboratively so I set them up with accounts on Writely and their final transcripts can be accessed here. The students were given no instructions on how to use this software.

After the planning session came to and end, each group was given an i-river mp3 recorder or a mobile phone with recording and bluetooth functionality. They were all instructed on how to record - ‘Press the RED button’, and then left to get on with it in a quite place around the school.

An hour or so later they all had some material for the editors to incorporate into the podcast. At this point the reporters needed to locate images to add to the podcast that would play on a video ipod.

Once this was done, the students were pointed to the schools mfl blog to comment on the activities they had done during the session.

The podcast was soon finished and the class opened up the final blog posting from the session, and were asked to comment on the podcast while they were listening to it.

In all it was an excellent session, the students really enjoyed the day by the smiles on their faces - a session that will definately be repeated.