Episode 45: Zooming In on Podcasting with Students-Part One
The Birch Meadow Way Podcast can be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify
The Birch Meadow Way Podcast Website (includes embedded podcast player)
Transcript:
(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)
Melissa Milner 00:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... podcast will highlight innovative practices and uncommon parallels in education.
Before I get started with part one of Podcasting With Students, I want to thank my loyal listeners and the newcomers to The Teacher As... I would love to hear from all of you. I really enjoy doing this podcast, but it is tough episode after episode not hearing back from you, the listeners, with feedback and ideas for future shows.
So what are you enjoying about the podcast? And what would you like me to do more often? Or do you have a question you want to ask me? Are you already podcasting with students and want to share about it?
I have a new simple way for you to reach out to me. You can go to my website, www.theteacheras.com. And you will see a prompt on the right side of every page that says Send Voicemail. It's a simple, quick process, and I would love to hear from you. I might even share the audio of your voicemail in an episode.
Please let me know in your voicemail if you're okay with me sharing your message. You can share your name or go incognito. Thank you in advance for taking the time to leave a voicemail. It means a lot to me. Hope to hear from you soon.
So welcome to part one of a series of episodes about podcasting with students. I'm so excited. My colleagues and I started podcasting with our fourth graders this past spring 2021. If you want to hear more about how we worked together to accomplish this, check out The Teacher As... Episode 39: Adventures in Co-Teaching.
The Birch Meadow Way podcast's first season has five episodes. And during that process, I reflected a lot. This is an ongoing process of figuring out student voice and choice, structure and focus of episodes, and much more.
In this episode, I focus on some options for student created content. In part two, I will focus on lessons learned regarding rehearsal and students' performance of the content. In part three, I will talk about the logistics of doing a podcast with students, including equipment, recording, and editing. I am also working on some episodes with professionals who can shed light on all aspects of podcasting with students, including interviewing, public speaking skills, and writing skills.
Throughout, I will share short clips from The Birch Meadow Way podcast. If you want to hear the segments and episodes in their entirety, you can search The Birch Meadow Way podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. I will also include a link to The Birch Meadow Way podcast website on this episode page at theteacheras.com.
My colleague, Arielle Mucha - shout out - started The Birch Meadow Way podcast website with students this past spring, and it is a work in progress. This whole idea of podcasting with students started because I was working on my own podcast, The Teacher As..., and thought it might be a cool activity to do with our fourth graders.
I started planning The Teacher As... podcast during the shutdown, spring 2020. I researched, wrote, interviewed, watched a lot of YouTube videos about how to do all this, and rehearsed a lot before I was ready to publish my first episodes in July. The learning curve was steep, and it inspired me to implement podcasting with my students. What a challenging, fun way for our students to publish their work to the world!
The school year was a strange one. And the fourth grade team was focused on the social emotional well being of our students and delivering content fully remote and then in a hybrid model. Once most of our kids were in person in April, we felt it was finally time to get the podcast rolling. In talking about content, the first choice we made for many reasons was to have students record something they were already learning.
The main reason was time constraints. But in addition, the students were already enjoying learning about these topics. We decided the podcast for this school year would mostly be a way to publish student work in the time of a pandemic when parents couldn't come in for presentations, spring open house, etc.
One fourth grade teacher grouped her students for their forces of nature reports in science. And another fourth grade teacher grouped her students for their southwest regions reports in social studies. They wrote their reports as scripts in a conversational podcasting style, and they came out great! We spread out these reports into five episodes.
Here are two short clips of this kind of content.
SOUNDBITE
Reese 05:07
Welcome, I'm Reese.
Emma 05:09
And I'm Emma. And we're going to take you on a tour to the southwest.
Reese 05:12
Specifically to--
Reese and Emma 05:13
Monument Valley.
Emma 05:15
Monument Valley is located in northern Arizona, and a little bit of it is in Utah.
Reese 05:20
Monument Valley is very hot and gets very little rainfall every year. People have been living in Monument Valley for many years. Monument valley is inside the Navajo American Indian Reservation.
SOUNDBITE
Male Student 05:32
Are you relaxing on the beach building sandcastles and then you see a giant 300 foot wave? Hi, welcome to The Force of Nature: Tsunamis. We are going to tell you a lot about tsunamis. First we will explain what a tsunami is. Then we'll explain the cause of tsunamis.
After that we will explain the effects. Next we'll explain how tsunamis are measured. Also we will explain ways to predict tsunamis and stay safe. Finally we will share some firsthand experiences from real people in real life.
SOUNDBITE
Melissa Milner 06:02
What was missing was smaller, fun segments to round out each episode. Tricia and I had our class work on that part. It really allowed for student voice and choice in coming up with the segments. Our students created Joke Junction, Story Time, Book Buzz, and Sports Hub. Here are some clips of those segments.
SOUNDBITE
Walter 06:23
Welcome to The Joke Junction.
Nicky 06:25
Get ready to have your funny bone tickled!
Walter 06:28
Hey, Nicky, what does a ghost teacher say?
Nicky 06:30
I don't know, Walter. What does a ghost teacher say?
Walter 06:33
Look at the board, and I'll go through it again.
[RECORDED LAUGHTER]
Nicky 06:39
What do you call a school with an ice cream sundae?
Walter 06:42
I don't know. What do you call it?
Nicky 06:43
Deserted.
[RECORDED LAUGHTER]
Walter 06:48
Hey, Finn, if it took eight men eight hours to build a wall, how long would it take for four men to build the same wall?
Finn 06:56
I don't know, Walter. How long?
Walter 06:58
No time at all. The wall was already built.
[RECORDED LAUGHTER]
Finn 07:05
Hey, Walter, did you see that six foot snake at the zoo?
Walter 07:09
I didn't know snakes had feet, Finn.
[RECORDED LAUGHTER]
SOUNDBITE
Clara 07:16
Welcome to The Birch Meadow Way Podcast: Story Time. My name is Clara, and I wanted to share a story that I wrote with you. Seth the Sloth's Race of the Jungle, the jungle version of the story of the tortoise and the hare.
In the humid, rainy climate of the Amazon rainforest, all of the animals were still asleep. The jaguar was in her den sheltered by trees, the monkey in this tree top perch. Every animal, that is, except for Seth.
SOUNDBITE
Charlie 07:43
Welcome to Sports Hub. In this segment, we'll be sharing information about famous athletes. Hi, this is Charlie.
Brendan 07:49
Brendan.
Owen 07:50
Owen.
Reid 07:51
And Reid.
Charlie 07:52
Today we will be talking about Wayne Gretzky.
SOUNDBITE
Student 1 07:56
The Book Buzz today is I Survived the Bombing of Pearl Harbor Attack, 1941 by Lauren Tarshis.
Student 2 08:02
We recommend this book because there's a lot of action.
Student 1 08:05
The main character, Danny Crane, moved from New York to Hawaii. He moved there because his mom thought New York was too dangerous. Little did she know, Pearl Harbor was about to be under attack.
Student 2 08:17
To this day, the bombing was a big part of Hawaii's history. You may think that this topic is boring, but the author makes it so that you don't get bored by including love, action, and fun parts.
SOUNDBITE
Melissa Milner 08:32
Super cute, right? A little background, the students created podcast artwork and then voted on it. The students also voted on the podcast music, which we got from Free Music Archive. We told the students to listen for something happy and peppy and limited them to listening only to instrumental to avoid any inappropriate content. I'll share the logistics of both the artwork and the music in part three.
So I've mentioned two types of content so far, publishing school projects and student created ongoing segments that repeat in each episode. For the segments, students curated jokes, chose athletes they admired to research and report on, chose the books they wanted to buzz about, and created original short stories. I love this choice and voice kind of content, but also feel there’s a place for longer reports on what they are learning about in social studies and science.
I would change the length of the reports that we did have, maybe making it short snippets of fun facts instead of long seven to eight minute reports. I'm hoping to have students find a way to include math next year as well. Both of these kinds of content were scripted by students. And students read the scripts while recording. No need to memorize.
It is important to think about what your students will be comfortable doing. Some students may be ready for unscripted chats about a topic. This is another kind of content. It was very exciting to have two students this year who were interested in recording this kind of content.
Whatever the topic is, the students have to be confident and knowledgeable to make the unscripted chat work for an audience. If I weren't podcasting myself, I don't think I would have even thought of having students do anything unscripted.
So how did this start? Two students came to me asking if they could write a script about which is better, skiing or snowboarding. I told them that they could write a script. But if they want, since they know so much about the topic, they could just talk and we can edit it afterwards. I explained that a lot of podcasts are done in a conversational style. They were totally game for doing it as a chat and were amazing.
Before recording, I just asked what are your main ideas that you want to make sure to mention. And they referred to that list as needed while recording. So here's a short clip from that segment.
SOUNDBITE
Student 3 11:07
Depending on if you're doing the race or if you're just free snowboarding, snowboarding costs more either way.
Student 4 11:14
Well, I kind of disagree with that. Because all of the race equipment can get really expensive. Because you need two pairs of skis, two pairs of poles. And some people even have two helmets. You need two of everything because there are two different kinds.
There's GS, which is big turns and you have larger skis. And then there's slalom, which you go around the small turns and hit the gates. And if you don't know what a gate is, a gate is basically a pole or two poles that is stuck in the ground that you go around or hit.
You can race another person, which is called a dual course, the same exact course right next to each other. And you can also do a single course, which is just one course that people go down.
Student 3 12:02
Well, snowboarding, you don't need two of everything. And you don't need poles to help you push around. Because snowboarding, you have to unclip one foot and use your back foot to push the board so that you can get where you need to go. At some points, it can get annoying. But once you get used to it, it's pretty much that way.
SOUNDBITE
Melissa Milner 12:23
It's so exciting to hear students passionate, talking about things that they know a lot about. So I was really excited, within our first five episodes, to be able to have an unscripted segment. And I'm hoping we can do that some more next year as well. Some other types of content could be interviews, reporting on field trips, or you could pose a question to your students ahead of time. Have students write and then record their responses.
This was what we did after learning about slavery in the south. Students were clearly upset about what they learned. And we asked them to simply reflect on their feelings about slavery. The following content was recorded on Zoom during remote learning. So the sound quality is not as good since a professional mic wasn't used.
I will talk more about equipment and recording options in part three of this series. Here's a short clip of the students' responses about slavery.
SOUNDBITE
Student 13:21
We are learning about the history of the south and specifically about slavery, segregation, and civil rights. After the first lesson about slavery, we all had some pretty strong feelings that we shared in an assignment. Here are just some of those reflections.
Maria 13:36
Hi, this is Maria. I always feel upset when I learn about slaves, because they were thought of as less than human. One thing that surprised me was that it was illegal to teach a slave how to read.
SOUNDBITE
Melissa Milner 13:49
Obviously, podcasting is not a visual medium unless you're video podcasting on YouTube for instance. As I mentioned earlier, Arielle Mucha, one of the teachers on the fourth grade team, started a website for the podcast with her students. That way, for example, if the students are teaching about tsunamis, they can tell people to go to the website to find links and see images. Also on the website are the embedded players for each of the episodes.
Like I mentioned, it's very much a work in progress, but it's another way to share content, including visuals. My goal this coming school year is to focus our episodes better. The five episodes we did were all over the place as far as topics. I'm trying to find a way to have a through line.
For instance, there could be one or two episodes focused on forces of nature. So along with short fact segments about the different forces of nature, the kids could curate jokes about the topic, do a Book Buzz about a book that is related like an I Survived by Lauren Tarshis or a nonfiction choice.
Story Time can be a short story including a force of nature. The Sports Hub segment could maybe be about names of sports teams related to forces of nature and why they think the teams chose to do that - the Colorado Avalanche in the NHL, the San Jose Earthquakes in the MLS, and the Seattle Storm in the WNBA. Another cool idea is students could interview people who survived a force of nature, like a big earthquake, a hurricane or the blizzard of '78.
Well, that's it for part one of Podcasting With Students. I hope you enjoyed this focus on the content of podcasting. Again, I will have some interviews with guests that might shed some more light on content in podcasts like interviewing. I hope you enjoyed it.
If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating, as well, if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner. And I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates.
I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was "Upbeat Party" by Scott Holmes.
So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!