Students at Washington Elementary School have been working on recording podcasts, with the help of the staff at Cornell College.
Erin Lane at Cornell College had seen the Student Podcast Challenge offered by National Public Radio was being offered for fourth graders to participate in.
“I knew my daughter’s class has focused on learning about different writing styles, and this seemed like it would be a good fit,” Lane said.
Teacher Heather Bauer, when approached about the idea, was a little hesitant, as she’d never taught a unit like this.
“Erin and Matt Zhorne made this process so smooth and easy,” Bauer said. “They put together a wonderful lesson to help students understand the process and the desired outcome.”
As part of that first visit, students were exposed to different styles of podcasts to help spark ideas for the podcasts they could create on their own.
“We talked about the different writing and podcast styles, such as interviews, talks between friends, or narrative story type podcasts,” Bauer said. “As students worked, we talked about what their target audience might be and how they might want to sound when recording their podcasts.”
Bauer said that students had complete creative control on the topic for their podcasts, and were tasked with coming up with a podcast idea between three and eight minutes in length.
“I wanted them to be passionate about what they were going to be writing about,” Bauer said. “I did give them a few guidelines they needed to follow. I told them they could work in groups of 2 or 3, or they could choose to work alone. They also had to write a podcast that would be school appropriate.”
After those topics were selected and students got to writing, Bauer, Lane and Zhorne were collaborating on selecting the type of music that might collaborate with student’s podcasts.
“We did not want the students to have to weed through too many different musical snippets,” Bauer said. “This helped the music selection to still allow for choice, but in an efficient manner.”
And Thursday, April 12 and Friday, April 13, students from the elementary school walked up the hill to Cole Library’s first floor to record their podcasts.
Topics of the podcasts ranged from the Super S’s who were excited about all the different uses of the letter S, Hawaii history, a fiction story, presidential history podcast, and a few different styles of sports podcasts.
Zhorne worked with students to make sure they didn’t worry too much about mistakes as they were recording.
“Many podcasts are conversational in manner, and having little mistakes is not an issue,” Zhorne said. “If there are big mistakes, we can pause and re-record starting at that section.”
The other important instruction was how sensitive the microphones were to catching the sound in the room and how to flip the pages of a script to be minimally disruptive to the podcast.
And when the headphones and microphones went on, there were bouts of giggling fits as students got used to talking on the microphones.
“I can hear myself,” said Lucy Cook, as she got used to listening to the recording. .
Others, like Gracie Dielschneider, came with a script for a story they had ready and marked up for the sound cues they knew were going to make their story pop. Zhorne and Dielschneider talked about how sound would be implemented in the podcast after the fact in the next process after recording.
On recording day, students were either working in recording on the booth or getting their podcast’s artwork designed and selecting the background or interstitial music that would accompany their podcast.
“Many of them already had a picture in their mind of what they wanted their album cover to be, so it was working with finding the right fonts and sizing,” said Amy Gallen.
“It’s such a different energy working with these students than college students for podcasts,” Zhorne said.
“I was surprise with how excited everyone was with this process,” Lane said.
Indeed, Bauer said, a few students said they were sad this unit was going to be concluding.
Gracie Dielschneider prepares to read her narrative story podcast as Matt Zhorne gets the microphones in the studio ready with proper levels.