The Herd's Point of View: A student-produced podcast

 The Binscarth Grade 7 and 8 class has been hard at work tackling the project of producing a podcast episode.  The Herd's Point of View Episode 1 was released May 8th and I'm really proud of the work these students have done for this project!  Miss Payne invited me to her ELA class to help out with this project and I was so glad to be involved.  I witnessed some awesome teamwork as this class planned, created and promoted their podcast.  

You can listen to their episode "Things Parents Don't Understand" which is all about sleep.  

Episode summary: We discussed one of the issues we feel our parents don’t understand, why teenagers need to sleep in on the weekends. We debated all kinds of questions to do with the topic and even got the parents’ opinions.

Creating a Podcast

If you've ever wondered what's involved with producing a podcast, here are some of the tasks this team of students tackled during this project:

• Listening to other podcasts to identify common features of podcasts
• Brainstorming topic ideas and narrowing it down 
• Creating a vision for the podcast including a theme and title
• Deciding on a target number of episodes and a release schedule 
• Scripting or outlining the episode, including planning for guests or interviews
• Naming the podcast and episode
• Recording episode(s)
• Creating an intro and outro to add to each episode
• Editing episode(s)
• Writing an episode summary and/or show notes
• Designing cover art
• Creating a promotional plan to share the podcast
• Releasing the podcast and sharing it!

Technology Tools for a Podcasting Project

The Herd's Point of View podcast production team used the following tech tools:

• Google Docs: for editing shared files when planning and scripting
• WeVideo: for recording and editing the intro, outro and episode
• Canva: for designing the cover art and promotional materials 
• Anchor FM:  Miss Payne used a free Anchor FM account to publish the finished episode

Student Ownership

One of the great things I observed when I visited the Grade 7 and 8s during this project was how they took ownership of their work. Students were assigned different roles (based on their preferences) such as scripting, recording, editing or promotion. One student might be working on the script for the episode, while another designed promotional graphics and someone else was creating the intro audio.  All of the students were involved in initial planning and all of them took part in recording the episode.  From my visits to the classroom, I could see that each student took responsiblity for their task(s) in order for the project to succeed. 

A Polar Bear Project: Collaborative Knowledge Building with OneNote

This month, during a Skype call with Mrs. Caldwell's class, the Oak Lake Kindergartens told us that they were learning about polar bears and planning to participate in the 2017 World Wildlife Fund Polar Bear Walk.   The kindergartens asked our grade 1 class if we would like to collaborate with them for this special project.  The grade 1s were very enthusiastic about the idea, so we agreed to start by doing some research about polar bears.  We decided to use Microsoft OneNote so that we could take notes and collect resources collaboratively.  Mrs. Caldwell set up a shared OneNote file with sections for facts, resources, questions and project planning.  Having a shared file is working very well for this project!

Our class has really enthusiastically started researching polar bears.  We've been doing a lot of reading and writing about polar bears.  Many of our read aloud sessions focus on reading non-fiction texts about polar bears.  As we learn new things about polar bears, we write or type new ideas into the shared OneNote file.  We also read the new ideas that Mrs. Caldwell's class has added from their research.  In addition to our whole-class research and reading, students have also learned new things while listening to reading (recorded books from Epic) and during guided reading lessons.  We have found some interesting educational videos and we like to watch the live polar bear cam from Churchill, MB.  We continue to build our knowledge and share our findings with our partner class.