Each year, my seventh grade students read independent novels that support other pieces of literature we cover in class. In the past, I have held “speed booking” sessions where students present the books that they have read to each other. Students bring their independent reading books to class and spend a couple minutes talking about and critiquing the story to their peers.
I thought that podcasting could really enhance this book sharing experience in my classroom. This year, instead of doing the speed booking activity, I would like students to share their stories through podcasting. After creating a podcast book talk myself, I have realized how the experience pushed me to plan and think critically in order to share what I knew about the piece of literature. I found that I needed to write a general script of I wanted to share about the book. Once I recorded some information, I was able to listen to myself talk. Many times, I rerecorded myself because there were long silences between statements or I just sounded uneducated! This is when I realized that podcasting can be much more than just recording yourself. It requires writing, speaking, listening, and editing (covering most of the state standards for language arts!).
When I do this activity with my students, I will provide them with this sample book talk podcast as a model. I also think that it is important to give students guidelines for what they discuss in their book talk (title, author, summary, ending, favorite part, excerpt, rating, sequel information, recommendation, etc.). Before creating my podcast, I listened to a few book talks given by middle school students. This helped me develop a general outline for what I planned on discussing. My students will be able to listen to the podcast I created to help them with their own planning. I really look forward to implementing this podcast activity in the near future!
Link to my podcasting host site: http://carrieatarcadia.podbean.com/
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"I rerecorded myself because there were long silences between statements or I just sounded uneducated! This is when I realized that podcasting can be much more than just recording yourself. It requires writing, speaking, listening, and editing."
ReplyDeleteRecently, I was creating an orientation video for new online students and I can attest to this. I had about 15 total parts to record. Each time I hit record it saved the audio as recording1, recording2, etc. Even if I deleted recoring2, the next time I recorded it would save it as recording3. By the time I finished those 15 parts, I was around recording50.
Also, you gave me an amusing idea. Have you ever occasionally wondered if a student has even read what they've written when they turn in a paper? While it might be easy for them to not care about what they've written, I'd bet they'd care if they had to narrate their paper.