Youth Radio - History in the Making!
Posted by Paul Allison on November 7th, 2006
David Warlick has been challenging us to tell “the new story .” Well here’s one.
Let’s imagine that we were in the middle of writing a history of blogging and podcasting in the elementary and middle school classroom. And let’s start with the experiences of the teachers who are going to join us on Teachers Teaching Teachers this Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. This is how that history might read. Do we have the makings of a Wikipedia article here?
One of the roots of podcasting in the early grades might be digital storytelling. Long before RSS became widely used, a few teachers were working with students to make mixed digital media stories. For example, in 2001 Librarian Glen Bledsoe, made an “audio-only digital story” with his students at Molalla Elementary School, which is just outside of Portland, Oregon.Glen wanted to do a month on different writing genres: mystery, adventure, western, and so on. When he asked students what science fiction was, he got blank looks. Glen thought everyone would say, “Star Wars!” (There was even a teacher named Ms. Force at the school.) But the closest guess was “Scooby Doo.”
To remedy this situation Glen brought in several classic sci-fi movies: “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and one of his favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man.” The ending scene shows the protagonist being shipped off to an alien world to be turned into a human-pot pie.
When the students saw this, they blanched. “What happens next, Mr. Bledsoe?” they asked.
Glen said, “You tell me.”
Glen and his students sat down and began to sketch out the sequel. They called it “Recipe for Terror.”
There are probably many other examples of work like this, but now let’s take a look through a new window that opened up when teachers started using RSS in 2005.
Many teachers first thought about podcasting from their classrooms after listening to Bob Sprankle’s 3rd and 4th graders in Wells, Maine: Room 208 (first show: Room 208 Podcast 04.29.05). In the September 2006, Bob became a Technology Integrator, and Room 208 seems to be on hold. (Bob and his colleagues in Maine can still be heard on his Bit by Bit podcast.) But Room 208 inspired many teachers to try podcasting with their students.One example comes from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Students in Lee Baber’s CompTech8 classroom started podcasting in the Fall of 2005 to discuss the use of technology in their classroom. They enjoyed learning GarageBand and the other students were inspired to create their own versions after hearing the first recording from a fellow classmate.
Lee’s students also started blogging with students in Brazil on the PersonalLearningSpace and the students from Brazil were sending recorded interviews of themselves to the students in Virginia. Lee’s students were anxious to hear their voices and to share their own voice with students from so far away.
They began a webcast called “SpaceCast,” which spawned live meetings with other students as well as some very special guests. This live meeting became their new method of podcasting. The blog and SpaceCast are still thriving and continue to grow and mature into a very exciting collaborative project. Lee is documenting the progress and there are now 500+ members and a weekly live show, soon to be twice weekly. Andy Carvin says Lee and her collaborators are developing new knowledge that serves as a learning experience while impacting their communities publicly.
Other recent experiments have also been seen as a way for students to listen to the voices of their pen pals, a natural extension of blogging. Kevin Hodgson, an elementary school in Western Massacusetts, experimented a bit with audio in 2005 with Maria Angala in DC. Keven watched his white suburban students listen to the voices of their pen pals (very much not white and suburban) It was very cool and enlightening for all. Kevin also did a few audiocasts through his Electronic Pencil weblog (http://blogs.writingproject.org/oh/) last year.There are many other blog projects connecting a handful of elementary or middle schools together, and a few use audio and RSS to do this.
- One interesting example of blogging in the early grades is growing like a tree in Brooklyn: P.S. 124’s Web Log.
- Teb Locke, a teacher at The Neighborhood School in Lower Manhattan, has also been adding to this conversation about using Web 2.0 in the elementary school. Teb has been using podcasts, blogs, and wikis with his students at the Neighborhood School for about a year now. The sites his students are currently using are: Neighborhood Wiki, NeighborhoodBlog, and The Neighborhood Elgg.
- Jason Shiroff’s Specraloud site is another place to look. Jason’s Drupal site “is designed to promote learning, communication, and understanding between students, parents, and the global community.”
- Glen Bledsoe’s upcoming Room 17 is worth following as well.
Where is podcasting now in the elementary and middle school classroom? On this weeks Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast, we’ve invited a couple of Writing Project teachers who have started a project connecting sixth graders from around the country on a blog and podcast called Youth Radio: Connecting Youth Voices. Glen Bledsoe, Gail Desler, Kevin Hodgson, and Jason Shiroff are some of the key players behind this site.Instead of just creating Youth Radio for his own students and his school, Kevin Hodgson got together with Gail Desler, a Writing Project colleague in California to ask: “Why not open it up to other great teachers we out there?” Kevin, Gail and others have slowly tried to assemble other classroom teachers and coordinators for Youth Radio.
For many of the teachers they are contacting, this is their first experience using podcasting. Gail, for example is supporting a 6th grade teacher and Writing Project fellow (Area 3 in California), Jim Faries to bring his students on board. Gail and Jim are finding that students love connecting with other students and listening to their voices (and listening to their own voices too.). For example one comment to a podcast on Youth Radio reads:
This is Clay from Mississippi. If you come here you should try playing baseball,soccer or any other sport.And try some of the local restaurants. We have a lot of outdoors games.
Hear you later.
Already it sounds normal to end a comment with “Hear you later.”
Of course there have been challenges as well. A few teachers who wanted to join Youth Radio had to be dropped because their school would not allow access, or because the technology was farther along than their comfort level. A couple of other teachers are still gearing up, including some in Puerto Rico and Mississippi. Kevin is also hopeful that their contacts with the Pinoy Network of teaching in the Phillipines will eventually pan out. It’s exciting to see this group of teachers reach beyond their state and national borders!
Here are some future ideas for Youth Radio that Glen Bledsoe, Gail Desler, and Kevin Hodgson have discussed. They want to:
- Collaborate on single broadcast files with parts submitted by different schools and assembled by one school on a shared topic.
- Link our kids together on a global issue or project (working on this right now, possibly with a local woman who has created an art exchange with students in US and students in Iraq.
- Share some video (red flags for privacy, I know and not sure how to make it work yet).
- Give audio tours of communities. (You can already see kids wondering what it is like to live in other places).
And here are some challenges that these teachers already see coming up:
- How to track discussion forum with un-threaded Wordpress software. (And free Wordpress, to boot, which makes adding any plug-ins or additional programs tricky, if not impossible)
- Access issues for some schools.
- How to make time for it all in the curriculum.
- Keep it large enough for sharing of many ideas but not too large that no one connects with each other.
- How to keep the site active enough to keep everyone engaged on multiple levels.
- Where to host the audio files? I use Box.Net (paying for it but worth every cent) and have suggested Ourmedia to others (but I found it very frustrating to use). Now, I offer to host the audio files for folks, if needed, just to get them on the air.
On this Wednesday’s Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast, we’ll hear their stories, and some of their reasons for wanting to connect their students with each other via podcasting and blogging. We’ll start with stories from these elementary and middle school classrooms. We want to find out what impact these teachers see from blogging and podcasting across schools. How has writing changed? What has been surprising? What problems have people run into?Lee Barber also wonders whether or not students are really understanding what we are doing. How can we help students embrace their writing and podcasting as a voice in their community? Do Students understand the impact they will have as the public becomes more aware through teachers natural tendencies to showcase their work?
Recently Kevin Hodgson wrote:
One of my students — a somewhat troubled child with a long history of behavior issues and a difficult home environment — really bloomed when he asked me if he could contribute something substantial to Youth Radio — I gave him the tools, encouragement and let him go, and he just bloomed. That is what teaching is about, whether it is technology or something else that suddenly grabs a kid’s attention and gets them engaged in learning.
Join us at 9:00 p.m. at EdTechTalk.com to hear more stories like this one. Add yours by commenting on this post!