Podcasting for a Real Audience

By Year 10, a significant number of students have decided that they don’t like Science or they think it is too hard and are relieved to find that in Year 11 they do not have to do Science. I have had classes with these students many times and decided I needed to do something more engaging than the traditional approach. My first attempt to do this used podcasting.

Because the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing was approaching, I decided to do an assignment where students would research problems that had to be solved in order for the mission to be successful. Rather than a written report they were to prepare a script and record it as a podcast.

To help students get started I played them a few sample podcasts from Brain Stuff and suggested they follow a similar format for their episodes. We also played a few online videos about the Apollo 11 mission before they began their web research.

When their scripts were ready they were taken to a computer in a quiet place with a microphone headset where they recorded their episode in Audacity (a free program). Some students had learned how to use Audacity in their ICT class and there were enough of these students in the Science class to help their colleagues to operate Audacity. Audacity provides the ability to edit the audio so some students were able to cut out unwanted noises such as coughs and “ums”.

Once students had finished their recording they saved it as a WAV file and gave me a copy. I then used Garageband on my Mac to dress it up a bit and convert it to MP3 format before uploading it to Podbean, a free podcast hosting website. We called our series Mooncast.

It would have been good to have students do these final tasks, but time pressure prevented it. Initially many students were self-conscious about hearing their own voices, but I think they really did get a buzz about having their work made accessible for a real audience.

Last year we changed the topic a little but continued the theme of researching space questions and I plan to do something similar again this year.