Tech How To: Podcasts

Here’s a secret:
Kids love doing podcasts.

Why not? It allows them to show off the cool stuff they’ve learned to the world.
Here’s what you need to know to get started.  

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Every week, Paul Bogush’s eighth-grade social studies students in Wallingford, Connecticut, get an opportunity that would be rare in a tech-free classroom. The kids take 20 minutes during lunch to interview career mentors—such as the dean of the Yale University School of Nursing—on the phone, in person, or over Skype. Then they share the interviews with the world in a podcast called Lunchtime Leaders.

The series began last year when the town’s mayoral election was in full swing. Working in two groups of four, the students interviewed the sitting mayor and his two opponents in three separate broadcasts. They went on to interview other prominent Connecticut citizens, and then began to cover different topics, interviewing various experts worldwide, from Australia to South Africa to Sterling, Kansas.

Teachers are using podcasts to connect their students to listeners local and long-distance to give projects a real-world context and audience, and to boost technological skills and independence. The best part? Creating and publishing podcasts is a relative cinch. We asked teachers whose students are expert podcasters to share their experiences and offer tips for getting going.

How Podcasts work
Podcasts are downloadable audio files (the “pod” in podcast refers to iPods, which were surging in popularity when journalist Ben Hammersley first coined the term podcast in 2004). Listeners can download podcasts, and also subscribe to them using an RSS feed. But for educational purposes, the word podcast is taken broadly—sometimes leaving out the “pod” element entirely, if the audio streams from a website—it all depends on school resources, Internet access, and privacy concerns. Many student podcasts exist online as streaming audio files, or are downloadable only with a password that teachers provide to parents.

In all their forms, podcasts have become a popular classroom activity during the past five years—iTunes is now populated with streams from hundreds of K–12 schools across the country. Some student podcasts are simply recorded versions of history or book reports. But today, podcasts coming from the classroom are frequently much more creative and ambitious team efforts.

Giving Students a Voice
Many teachers find that podcasting helps students realize that they have something to say, and that their knowledge has real-world value. Jeanne Halderson’s seventh graders at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, work together on several podcast series. One of the series, Coulee Kids, covers topics ranging from creative writing to frog dissection and anatomy. According to Halderson, “The number-one thing that they like about it is it makes their writing real. It isn’t just a project that they throw under their bed or throw away when they’re done; it’s something people actually [use].”

Earlier this year, the students published a series of four podcasts called Letters to Soldiers, filled with anecdotes about day-to-day life in Wisconsin, for homesick troops in Iraq. Another series, The Road She Traveled, involves direct interaction with adults in the community. The podcast arose out of a partnership with the League of Women Voters. The League picks women who are making a difference in the community, and the women visit the school to be interviewed by students. The podcast features two sections—interviews with the women, and “docudramas,” which are first-person reenactments of days from the women’s lives, as imagined, written, and read by the students.

Building Independence
If you are worried that the technical aspects of podcasting will eat away valuable time, have no fear. According to Halderson, her students do all the work of creating the podcasts. They quickly learn how to use GarageBand, an application created specifically for recording and editing audio, and they manage the technical aspects themselves. “Our role is facilitator,” Halderson says. “We don’t even sit in on the interviews.”

Halderson feels that one of the advantages of using podcasts in the classroom is the idea of the potential listener in the students’ minds. “Having a real audience is the biggest benefit. If they’re just handing an assignment to a teacher, it’s not a big deal, but if everyone in the world can hear it, it ups the ante.”

Middle school students may be able to learn to edit podcasts without teacher supervision, but the same cannot be said of younger elementary students. Cathy Greenwald, a technology leader and reading intervention teacher for Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska, edits the Radio WillowWeb podcasts herself. It takes time, but the kids love it. The fourth- and fifth-grade podcasts have hosts, and include “interviews” with historical figures like Christopher Columbus and Albert Einstein. And even the first graders make their own podcasts. At that level, there’s less role playing—the students don’t act. “But first graders can share their knowledge as well as fifth graders,” says Greenwald.

Students in Michigan’s Saline district schools create podcasts that run the gamut from book reports to newscasts about the human body. In a podcast on the immune system, kids make creative use of humor, mimicking standard radio format. A quiz show about white blood cells is interrupted by an emergency news report on the common cold, and features a commercial for antibodies, complete with a sales-pitch jingle.

Scot Graden, superintendent for Saline’s schools, says that when it came to the annual unit on the human body, the podcasts were a hit. “The students were more engaged with the content than they had been in the past,” he says. The reason? Greenwald believes that podcasting helps students distill crucial parts of any lesson. “It allows kids to choose what they think is important and share it with other people.”

1. INVEST IN DECENT COMPUTER MICROPHONES. Most computers have built-in mics, but ambient classroom noise can make these difficult to use and result in poor sound quality. Fortunately, headsets with microphones can cost as little as $6 online.

2. CHOOSE GOOD SOFTWARE. Apple computers come with GarageBand software, which is great for recording and editing podcasts. Windows Vista computers come with Sound Recorder software for recording and Windows Movie Maker for editing. Another option for Windows users is to download free audio-editing software like Audacity.

3. DON’T FORGET THE MUSIC. Like most radio programs, podcasts often start with music or a theme song. Some students may record original music for their podcasts, but royalty-free or Creative Commons licensed music is easy to find online. Search for it on GarageBand.com (no relation to Apple’s GarageBand software) and PodSafeAudio.com.

4. TAKE AN EDITING TUTORIAL. The Web is full of podcast-editing tutorials—some are even in podcast form. A search for “podcasting in the classroom” or “podcasting for teachers” on iTunes reveals several good audio and video podcasts. Check out the illustrated video series Podcasting, from Learning and Teaching Scotland. Classroom 2.0 and Education.Ning.com are great places to connect with other teachers about podcasting strategies.

5. FIND YOUR PODCASTS A HOST. Once your students have put together their perfect audio files, where should you post them? In many ways, this is actually the hardest aspect of podcasting. Audio downloads take up bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money.

Some teachers find that getting podcasts onto official school websites is too complicated, technically difficult, or expensive. In that case, you can use free podcast-hosting websites. Podomatic.com’s free account gives you 500 MB of storage and 15 GB per month of bandwidth, while PodBean.com’s free hosting allows 100 MB of storage and 5 GB of bandwidth monthly. These amounts of storage and bandwidth will be more than enough for most classroom podcasts: If you post two podcasts a month at 10 MB each (about 10 minutes long), 5 GB of bandwidth would allow each to be downloaded 250 times in a month.

Once your podcast has a host, syndicating it on directories is free and easy. Simply enter the feed’s web address into the directory (for example, on iTunes, the Submit a Podcast link asks for a URL) and the systems will take care of the details.

6. GET NOTICED! You’ll want students and parents to be able to find your class’s podcast easily. The best way to do that (besides sending a mass e-mail) is to make sure the podcast file has strong metadata. Metadata is information that doesn’t appear in the podcast’s title or in its content, but is attached to the MP3 file and allows people to find the podcast using search directories.

You can add meta-data to any audio file in iTunes: Just right-click the file and go to Get Info. Once there, you can add a detailed description, pick a genre (most likely K–12), and add important keywords like your class’s name, the grade, and the subject matter. If you’re posting podcasts on a blog or website, make sure that the entries have descriptive titles.

Instead of using “Jefferson Reports” for a podcast about Thomas Jefferson, go with “Mrs. Murray’s 4th Grade Podcast on Thomas Jefferson for Westfield Lower School.” This will make the content easier to find on Google.

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