[BC] Podcasts now part of school day

[Bill Sepmeier]

IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher's Pet
Special Recording Projects Nurture Students' Creativity

By Fern Shen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 19, 2005

At some schools, the rules are clear: Kids can chill out to downloaded music 
on portable players, but once they're inside, iPods and other learning 
distractions must be stowed in backpacks or lockers and kept there.

At Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, Camilla Gagliolo took another 
approach. Rather than fighting the fad, she's capitalizing on it by giving 
students iPods and re-imagining them as a learning tool.

"It just makes so much sense. They are so drawn to this technology. They are 
so excited by it. They're comfortable with it," said Gagliolo, the school's 
technology coordinator.

Using little more than an iPod and a school computer, Gagliolo and her 
students have been making podcasts -- online radio shows that can be 
downloaded to an iPod or other portable MP3 player. Avidly discussing their 
favorite iPod colors and models while they made recordings of their poems 
and book reports the other day, the fifth-graders bubbled with ideas for 
future subjects.

"We could read parts of books, to show why we like them. We could do 
interviews. If there's a field trip, we could make a recording of it and 
post it," said Mohamed El-Sayed, 10. "Kids anywhere will like to hear about 
us."

Podcasting is just one of the interactive technologies, like blogging and 
hand-held computers, being used to motivate students nationwide. It took off 
across the country last year, an offshoot of the surging popularity of 
iPods. A survey of 470 high school students released this month by analysts 
with Piper Jaffray & Co. found that 61 percent of students had some kind of 
MP3 player, up from 40 percent in their spring survey.

"This is the kind of technology they use for their daily lives. If schools 
want to reach today's learners, they can't ignore it," said Don Knezek, 
chief executive of the International Society for Technology in Education.

Colleges were the first to embrace the idea, giving iPods to freshmen and 
making podcasts of lectures. Now, podcasting is moving beyond the cappuccino 
crowd to the chocolate milk set.

In a private school near Detroit, middle-schoolers podcast performances of 
student-composed musical works. From East Oakland, Calif., high-schoolers 
paint an audio portrait, in English and Spanish, of their troubled 
community: "It's hard to see someone die in front of you." Gunston Middle 
School, in Arlington, has a cheeky student-made podcast that includes poetic 
commentary on Virginia's standardized testing: "SOLs are not your friends; 
they'll bring your life to an end."

Teachers say the benefits of making podcasts are clear: The trendy 
technology and the possibility of a wider audience motivate students. "My 
students research better, read more, write better and understand the 
material," said Beth Sanborn, a fifth-grade teacher at Willowdale Elementary 
School, near Omaha, where students have been making podcasts since last 
spring.

Podcasts at the school -- on such topics as the Constitution, Native 
Americans and electricity -- are not only filled with kid humor and snappy 
music, but they are also loaded with facts. Teachers hope they'll be used as 
supplementary curriculum material by future students.

"We want our podcasts to be timeless," said Tony Vincent, technology 
specialist at Willowdale. "We want teachers to play them for their classes."

To make a podcast on the Revolutionary War, Sanborn had her students spend a 
couple of weeks researching their material in books and on the Internet 
before shaping it into a script. They were graded on the written script, but 
what really motivated them, Sanborn said, was the hope that their work would 
be chosen for the 8 1/2 -minute podcast.

For the vocabulary segment, a boy did the word "bayonet." For the 
time-travel feature, another performed as a town crier, condemning King 
George's tyranny. Sanborn was especially impressed with the way they came up 
with their own jokes on such topics as the Constitution.

"You really have to understand the material to figure out a joke about it," 
she said.

Teachers are also finding other uses for portable music players in the 
classroom. In Carrollton, Tex., near Dallas, kindergartners are taking 
loaner iPods home to practice their vocabulary words, and English as a 
Second Language students are using them to practice English. Another 
Virginia school, Long Branch Elementary in Arlington, also plans a podcast 
program focused on its students who are learning to speak English.

Podcasting, it turns out, is also well-suited for keeping busy parents in 
touch with the world their children inhabit all day at school. All they have 
to do is program their computers to capture the broadcasts -- which could 
range from school announcements to plays to basketball games -- and they can 
then listen to them on their desktop computer or download them to a portable 
player.

"This idea is so great: I can hear what my daughter is doing and we can tell 
her grandparents, and they can hear it where they are," said Alison Pascale 
of Arlington, whose daughter Kalyn McNulty, 10, is one of the Jamestown 
podcasters.

Gagliolo has high hopes that it will flourish at her school. So far, she has 
found the technology easy to master and "simpler and cheaper" than making 
student videos. For most of the recordings she and a half-dozen students 
made at a recent session, they used a $40 snap-on microphone accessory, 
plugged into the school's iPod. (They hope to get more iPods so 
student-podcasters can make reports from throughout the school.)

The toughest part was getting the best possible sound quality from the 
youngsters, which sometimes meant doing it over and over again. Dalai 
Saruul, 10, spoke in a whisper when he first read his poem: "Calibur stands 
1 foot, 1 inch. He is said to be tall for his age. He is as strong as a 
rhinoceros beetle and is a kung fu master. . . ."

"You have to speak up," said Mohamed El-Sayed, holding the microphone out to 
Dalai. "Quiet on the set!" Kalyn yelled. (That meant that Frank Painter, 10, 
had to stop eating pretzel mix so loudly.) After a few takes, Dalai's voice 
grew stronger, a better match for his poem's subject.

Finally, the students learned how to edit on the computer, deleting mumbles 
and dead air. And with a few clicks of their mouse, they made Dalai's voice 
stronger still.

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