Casey’s Edublog.

This assignment takes the wondrous form of a podcast. Animal News (Chapter 1)

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I haven’t had a peer review yet, but here’s what John said:

Good job.

(He’s talkative and I’m sarcastic.)

My podcast is actually an example of an assignment I’d give to my students.

You can look at the assignment here: Podcast Assignment

If you don’t feel like looking at the actual assignment, here’s a shorthand summary:

Students are reporters working on a documentary focused on the events at Animal/Manor Farm. They can do interviews, news broadcasts, ten-years later, or advertisements. This was a broadcast example.

The assignment as a whole has lots of benchmarks attached to it. This particular example attaches itself to this beauty:

EL.08.LI.03: Identify and/or summarize sequence of events, main ideas, and supporting details in literary selections.

How it does what it’s supposed to: The news broadcast, in essence, is a summary. That’s pretty straightforward, non?

How it’s affected my fully myelinated brain: This was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. (That makes me kind of sad). At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to record the thing, and then I remembered that my mp3 player doubles as a digital recorder. Presto Bingo Silly reporter and sillier speeches created.

Then the trouble was putting it all together. I really liked messing around with GarageBand at school, but I live in a PC household (No Macs Allowed) so I had to mess with Audacity. I probably would have ended up using Audacity if it weren’t for my prior knowledge of a program called FruityLoops (John–the man friend–uses it for musical purposes). FruityLoops is a lot more user friendly than Audacity. Or maybe it just felt that way because I’ve used FruityLoops before, and Audacity required a bit too much accommodation for my over-stressed brain. It’s most likely this second theory–I’ve been known to dislike change and trying to adjust to a program that is somewhat similar to one I know pretty well but different enough to be difficult is exactly the kind of thing I’ll shy away from if I can. I’m resistant. But everyone who reads this and is stuck in PC land should check out FruityLoops and tell me that I was right and it’s much cooler. p

All of that said, the stitching together pieces wasn’t bad (it was actually quite fun), and I’m pretty satisfied with the final project (I did–I admit my laziness–get tired of fiddling with the settings for each of the pieces, so it’s not as silky as I’d like it to be, but it’s a lot better than it was when I started).

So that’s the story of the little podcast that could. I wish I had time to do it in my current placement ( Guess it’ll have to wait until fall.

End transmission.