Publishing is such an important part of standards that finding new ways to share student work is imperative. We are just finishing Technology Boot Camp’s session on podcasting and avatars. If you need some inspiration here is a first grade class’s video about making a podcast. This sample used a book review as the purpose. Other uses might be character analysis, interviews for research, doing a lab report, reading poetry, or reviewing textbook sections for classmates. The easiest possible tool for a podcast is ipadio.com. This is a free site which works with your phone. You register with them, get a toll-free number to call and a pin, and they record and post your podcast. They also provide embed code for you to add to your
class site and publish for parents or the world. The drawback to easy is that you may not edit. Sample Several free software programs will do recordings for you: Gargageband (Apple), Audacity (PC), and Movie Maker (PC). Audacity is audio only, but is a very good editor. We used this to record our script. You will have the most options if you save as an mp3. Once you have your recording you need a host site. Two free sites which are fairly simple to use are podbean and buzzsprout. Either of these will allow you to upload your recordings and provide your podcast’s homepage. They will also provide embed code for adding a player for your page. You can also produce a video podcast or vodcast. This can be done using Audacity for audio, Power Point for video display and Movie Maker to combine them. A really good demon-stration of how to do this is a Tony Vincent video using PC tools. In this sample about divisibility rules he uses voice enhancers to make it more interesting. This is a 13 minute video with explanations about all steps. Tony Vincent is an early advocate of pod-casts at his Learning in Hand site and has a blog which offers many more ideas and much more information. He also has an older booklet with all the information you need to do a podcast about your city...and a place to add it, too. Another way to add a little voice to class is with a Voki avatar...you can add recordings to them or more easily just type in what you want your “person” to say. Try some of these with your student authors or use them to flip.
Enjoy!
