ARTICE/VIDEO: 3rd Grade Podcasters

[Ryan Goble]

Excellent little feature at KQED's Mind/Shift blog about answering the age old question, "What grade can you begin to teach students how to produce their own digital media?"

From the blog:

...in general, I default to fourth grade as my response.

This past Spring, my perception shifted.

Monina Salazar, a 3rd Grade teacher at Live Oak Elementary School in San Ramon has raised the stakes and lowered what I thought was the age requirement for students to produce rich audio podcasts.

In this video, Monina describes how she teaches her students to create audio podcasts about biomes that explain a variety of ecosystems, referencing the climatic conditions along with the types of plants and animals that live there.

In her class, her students produced three different audio podcast assignments. They go through the process of researching and reading about specific biomes, writing a script that incorporates relevant sound effects and perhaps music to convey a sense of place and mood, research the internet for these sounds, and then they record their voice and edit and layer all of the sounds using Audacity.

And a video...

Read the full blog HERE.