December 2005 — MacAdemic/Mac Educator
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Podcasting: Transforming Middle Schoolers Into ‘Middle Scholars’
Podcasting is a form of teaching, according to Jeanne Halderson (pictured here with three of her seventh-graders).
An innovative seventh-grade teacher has turned her students into expert podcasters by integrating the new Apple technology into her daily curriculum.
WANT YOUR STUDENTS taking on—make that, volunteering for—new assignments? Then round up the following: one creative middle school teacher, an enthusiastic group of young people, and some powerful technologies from Apple Computer (www.apple.com). It’s a recipe for success, when the teacher is Jeanne Halderson, the young people are her students at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, WI, and the technologies are iPods and Macintosh iBooks with GarageBand and iPhoto software.
Broadcasting to the World
The 57 seventh-graders in Halderson’s classes are learning to create podcasts
as a natural component of their interdisciplinary, thematic curriculum. They
perform the same regular curricular functions as other students at the school,
and gladly do the extra work necessary to produce their podcasts. It matters
not whether the topic of learning is science, history, mathematics, language
arts, or any combination thereof. Students become thorough researchers, then
report their findings in a recorded audio format rather than merely as a written
report. The students see themselves as broadcasters, and they get a thrill when
their recordings are placed on the iTunes Music Store for anyone, anywhere in
the world, to listen to on an iPod.
Under Halderson’s watchful eye, students are in charge of the process. One of their first efforts was to research the availability of student-created podcasts. They learned that Longfellow students are the first in Wisconsin to produce their own programs.
Without any podcasts from their Wisconsin peers to compete with, the students listened to those they found in the general podcasting community, and became determined that their podcasts would be as good any available. They created guidelines for assessing the preproduction storyboards, scripts, and work assignments, and updated them as their understanding of podcasting grew. Their insistence on excellence was picked up by the Apple Distinguished Educator (ADE) podcast channel, Cut to the Core: Essential Podcasts for Educators, which adopted a slight modification of the guidelines the students drew up as its screening mechanism for quality assurance.
Three C’s in a Pod
Today’s middle schoolers are a technocentric lot. They multitask naturally,
hopping from one personal-level technology (like the iPod) to the next. So although
Halderson had no idea when she launched the podcasting project that it would
draw such worldwide attention, she trusted that her students would be drawn
to it. She also believed in the inherent power of Macs as instruments of education.
Halderson was sure that the combination of the two—willing students and
dynamic technology—held great potential when connected to genuine learning.
