A Worldwide Audience for Six Year Olds?

Cross posted on TechLearning Advisor Blog
Podcasting has been around for a while now. It has also made it’s entry into the world of schools. Teachers of younger students are venturing into the world of digital storytelling in the classroom and are recording their students digitally.

The benefits for students to practice skills such as the following are part of a growing list.

• listening
• speaking
• presenting
• comprehension
• storytelling
• performance
• voice acting
• oral fluency
• media
• technology

I believe that there is an added bonus, one that we are just beginning to explore with the younger crowd is the benefit of a having a worldwide audience. The process of creating and recording a podcast is only one part of it. The opportunity to having their work disseminate on a bigger scale is just starting to be possible as teachers are growing and expanding their PLN (Personal Learning Network).  This network can literally span the world through social network sites such as blogs, Nings and twitter.

I am curious to find out if having a global audience makes a difference to six year olds or not?

Does having a Global Audience make a difference?

Once our podcast MP3 file was created, I embedded the file into a blog post on Langwitches and sent an announcement on my Twitter network with the invitation to listen to the audio and leave a comment with their geographic location.

Over the weekend, comments with observations, encouragement, and commendation were pouring in. I tracked the location of the commenters on a Google Map.

The following school day, students were sitting at their desks listening eagerly to me read the comments for them. In addition I showed them the location on the map. I made it a point to remind them that “their” voices were traveling and reaching to far away places.

There were comments from:

• USA
• Argentina
• Scotland
• England
• Spain
• Germany
• Turkey
• China
• India
• Bangladesh
• Thailand
• Australia
• New Zealand

There were a few words that students immediately picked up on and were thrilled to hear over and over again in several comments. They were especially intrigued by the word “professional”. Proud giggles were heard when commenters told them they sounded like 4th or 5th graders and that college professors would let their student teachers listen to their voices as an example. They would be teaching others who were much older than themselves.

Andrea Hernandez from EdtechWorkshop suggested to create a Wordle from all the comments that were left on the blog. As always I am amazed how a word cloud can shed light in an instant on a “bunch of text”.

Wordle created from comments left by listeners of 1st Grade podcast

As we were reading the comments, we also talked about and noted differences among our commenters. Not only where they were coming from, but also if we could figure out, if they were male/female, teachers/parents/grandparents or elementary school level, middle school or at the university level.

During the day, as I met these first graders at different times in the hallway of the school, I was asked as they were passing by, if someone else had listened to”their” voices and where they were from.

At the end of the day, the same first graders were part of a Skype call with another first grade class from  North Carolina. When I asked them, if they had any questions to ask our Skype partners, immediately a hand shot up wanting to know: “if the teacher and the students from North Carolina were “fans” of ours and had listened to our podcast?” Since, the class in North Carolina had not heard it, we immediately sent the blog link to them to check it out.

Here are quotes from journal entries of these podcasting six year olds (Word for word, I only took the liberty and used spell check before posting )

When I heard those compliments, it made me feel happy and very excited. I loved hearing those compliments.

When I heard about the replies, I felt great. Just amazing, so good. They said so much good words. I loved it very much.

I was very happy when I heard them. I liked all the comments about Jack and Annie.

When people texted us, I felt so happy and surprised. I t was fun when I heard one text that they were a big fan.

My class did a very great podcast. People all over earth made us happy. They were nice to us. Yes, they were!

So so so so so so so so soooooooo great! And I liked it so much that I want to explode like a volcano.

When I saw the Wordle, I felt really unbelievable. It was cool!

I felt very happy when I heard they thought we did great. I did not feel sad, I felt excited.

It was fun making a podcast. When we made a podcast, it was good. When they sent us stuff, it was fun.

I felt proud of myself because we got so many comments. I liked them all, because they make me happy because they are very kind and nice.

So, what do you think? Does it matter to a six year old to have a worldwide audience? Does an audience beyond his/her teacher and parents influence student’s motivation and excitement for learning reading, writing, speaking and listening skills?

Podcasting with First Grade

If you have not thought of podcasting with your younger elementary school students, I encourage you to think again.

The first graders at my school had listened to the second grade podcast about animals, and had really enjoyed their story.They were especially thrilled that the second graders had received so many comments from teachers around the world. Believe it or not, but having an audience matters… even to 6 year olds.

They were enthusiastic and eager to record their own voices to get them “into other people’s computers and iPods” too.

I had started reading a chapter book called Vacation under the Volcano by Mary Pope Osborne from the Magic Tree House series with them.

The idea was to pretend that we were interviewing Jack and Annie, the two main characters, about their latest adventure that had taken them to Pompeii.

We read one chapter at a time and discussed as a class,  what happened as we were reading. After each   reading, I typed up all the questions and answers that students had came up with. The following time I went to their classroom, we recorded these questions and answers from the “script”.

I rotated all students to be either the interviewer, Jack (boys) and Annie (girls). I also had them record several segments as a class chant together (ex. gasping, “no children allowed”), which they seemed to enjoy very much.

Recording with Garageband

I had several students at a time come to the back of the class and record directly into Garageband, while the other students were silently working on classroom work or reading a book. A few times, I also took them out into the hallway, if the teacher had another activity planned in the classroom.

• I was amazed how cooperative and attentive to what was going on with the recording in the back of the room while it was not their turn.
• Several students started to take a real interest in the editing part of the podcast too. They were verifying that I was editing out any clicking noises that were included when I stopped the recording segment, or if a word was repeated twice.
• If they were not happy with their recording, they asked to record over it for a second, third or fourth time.
• Shy and quiet students were coming out of their shell. Their classmates were surprised and impressed of these new “podcast” voices they were hearing from them.

Recording in the Hallway

Recording:

• After demonstrating the difference in the sound of their voices and fluency, students agreed to NOT read off the script.
• I read one sentence at a time to the student who was to record. I let them practice saying the sentence out loud and coached them with their volume, melody and to use different acting voices.
• Some students needed to have sentences split into parts. Putting each sentence back together made it sound seamless in the recording.
• I could tell a drastic improvement among students in their confidence level and voice expression as we progressed in the book.

After class,

• I “cleaned” the recording tracks
• added music and  sound effects

The class couldn’t wait to hear the entire recording the next day. They wanted to hear the audio from start to finish, including the newest chapter clips. They begged to hear it again and again from the beginning and not only the added part. By the time we reached the end of the book they had heard the podcast over 20 times.

Skills addressed:

• listening
• speaking
• presenting
• comprehension
• storytelling
• performance
• voice acting
• oral fluency
• media
• technology

Take a “listen” and leave a comment to these first graders who worked very hard and enthusiastically on their recording. Let them know where you are from too. We will create a google map with placemarks to show how far their voices reached.

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Thank you for leaving our first graders comments. You are making a worldwide audience real for them and are keeping them motivated. We are tracking them on our Google Map. Once you leave a comment with your location, we will add you to our Google Map.

View MJGDS- 1st Grade Podcast: Magic Tree House in a larger map

Images that Inspire Storytelling & Writing

Using visuals to create and support stories is a skill we should encourage and nurture in our students . It should be obvious by now that I consider storytelling an integral part of a teacher’s toolbox. You can read about the Need for Storytelling and Why Storytelling Can/Should Be Anywhere/Everywhere and will understand why storytelling can fulfill many roles in the learning process.

Storytelling:

• helps us pass on knowledge
• connects the overwhelming flow of information,  so our brains can digest and remember it better
• uses a format that students of today are familiar and comfortable with

Now add visuals to the mix…

According to Wikipedia, Visual literacy is

the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading.

It is hard sometimes to make/find images available to your students (especially for the younger ones) that they can use in their digital storytelling projects or for creative writing. I am always hesitant to let them loose on Google or Flickr to find their own images, because of copyright issues, but also inappropriate content.

I wanted to share a Flickr set of the Travel Bear from Argentina, China, Egypt, Costa Rica, Peru and Italy. There are all in one place and licensed under Creative Commons to share and use with your students.

In the past, students have made up stories with images from the bear for younger students by using PhotoStory

Students could choose different images from the set to create whole new stories made up by them. Sixth graders created short movies for their first grade buddies.
Andrea Hernandez from edtechworkshop encouraged her first graders to choose an image from the Travel Bear’s Italy Blog, download the image into Pixie (or you could use KidPix or TuxPaint ) and the six year olds wrote a postcard style letter to Jose, the bear.

Here is a slideshow of images available from the travel bear around the world. I would love to hear what kind of creative writing projects you have come up with by encouraging your students to use creative commons images from the web? Please share…