Podcasting with students

I literally don’t have enough time in my life to listen to all of the podcasts that have been recommended for me. It is a genre that has become very popular; perhaps it’s because we can listen in the car and it works with the busyness of our lives. I have had a podcast for a little while now and I mostly try to interview kids (and their teachers). In my latest Social LEADia podcast, I interview one of my own grade 10 students who has created an Instagram account to compliment the students at my school.

Increasingly, there are teachers who are bringing the genre into the classroom as a way to amplify student voice. Here is a link to my interview with Grayson McKinney and Zac Rondot: two teachers who podcast with their grade 4 & 5 students respectively. And here is a link to my interview with Hans Appel and his students who create the Award Winning Culture podcast.

Recently, I was able to be on a panel for the ISTE Librarian Network about podcasting with students. I shared the experience of co-planning and co-teaching a unit on personal podcasts with English classes at my school. Apart from hating the sound of their own voices (typical), students really enjoyed the assignment and creating the podcast. Here is the website I created to support my students to podcast using Garageband. Check out the webinar below; the conversation is full of ideas and tools you can use with your own students.

Carla Jefferson was not able to make it to our webinar (which is why I stepped in), but follow her and check out the work she does around podcasting with students.

Why Podcast with students?

This is a question we tackle in the webinar, but these are the salient points:

Real authentic audience
Opportunity to practice oral communication
Natural tendency to revise and edit their work
Show students their voices matter
End product is an artefact kids can be proud of and can reference on post-secondary applications or job interviews