Mar
30
Podcasting 1st Grade Stories
March 30, 2006 | |
Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. Then parents and students fr
om other grade levels peruse the “library” of stories and check stories out to read and write reviews.
This year, we decided to add an audio component to the project. Each student will pick a favorite story and we will record them reading the story. The plan is to burn a CD of stories for each class, and to hopefully create a podcast of the stories that the larger community can enjoy.
I’m experimenting with our new iRiver T30, which I absolutely love in some ways, but is turning out to be a lot less M
ac-friendly than we had been led to believe. (MP3 files won’t import directly into GarageBand — Audacity is needed as a go-between.) In order to upload the kids’ audio, I’m doing a rather convoluted set of steps which I would love feedback on — I actually have no idea if this is the best way to do it. It is definitely NOT simple, and there’s no way that I’d ask a classroom teacher to do this for him/herself. So here are my steps:
- Record students reading their stories onto the iRiver (I thought about adding an external mic, but the sound quality w as practically identical.)
- Drag the mp3 files off the iRiver onto my iMac desktop
- Open the files in Audacity and edit out the stuff I don’t want. Export the files as an mp3 or wav file. I’m doing it this way because GarageBand won’t recognize the mp3s directly off the iRiver.
- Import the Audacity-created mp3s into GarageBand. Add jingle music ot beginning and end of stories. Use the Share Podcast command and save the mu4 file to my desktop
- Upload the mu4 file to my archive.org account (I won’t even MENTION how cumbersome that process is!!)
- Create a blog entry in the class edublogs blog with a link to each individual podcast
- Burn a feed for the blog using feedburner
- Publicize
I have only done 3 files so far, and it was really time consuming and a lot of steps. To hear what I’ve done so far, go to http://huckleberry.edublogs.org or to http://feeds.feedburner.com/huckleberry and see if you can get it to work.
Click here to hear my maiden attempt at uploading audio to archive.org before I had the kids do any recording.
So really — world — I’d love any advice about how to simplify this project and how to keep it relatively inexpensive and teacher-friendly.
Thanks in advance and I’ll be sure to post more about this as the project progresses.
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[...] My tech department colleague and one of our 4th grade teachers took the “blog as final project publishing tool” model one step further this week. Using the identical setup to the one I used for the audiobooks and the duck blog, these wonderful teachers have created a repository for all of the 4th grade student iMovies about the California missions. But for me, the best part is that the top post is a podcast of the students, explaining how they made their movies. Talk about making your process transparent. Great job! To see the movies, go to: [...]