How can students use digital audio?

Our school has a goal to be a leading school in audio eLearning.

What does this look like or what will it look like?

via Flickr

For a start the students have a live one-hour radio show on a community radio station each week (97.73SER Wed 2-3pm). All students in grade 5 and 6 who want to present a radio show have the opportunity to do so. The show involves script writing, collaboration with peers (they work in teams of 4), careful selection of music and practice to deliver their scripts with a credible and interesting voice. Their teacher operates the sound panel to for the show so that’s pretty intense too.

The program has certain elements that students are expected to talk about such as their interests, a community link and a link to the current classroom inquiry unit but it can include other original material such as stories, poems, songs etc. The radio show provides a genuine audience and authentic purpose for their work. The focus is clearly on developing oral expression and the digital recording equipment is the key to helping students evaluate and improve their skills. Soon I think there will be elements of the program that we will be able to podcast on our website as well.

Our school is quite large so it involves a lot of training and commitment to deliver a quality program each week.

We are also working toward using audio recordings to enhance students’ work in other areas of the curriculum such as movies, reflections of learning, storytelling and poetry. At the moment for example the students are using voice to annotate their understandings of their learning styles and intelligences on a PowerPoint slide show for their digital portfolios.

Students love the opportunity to use the recording equipment and even though they are sometimes shy when they first start to listen to their own voices, once involved they are engaged at a high level while they are producing the recordings. For teachers, work that has the annotated recordings show instantly the students’ understanding of the task. (Students are required to “tell the story” not read the text.)

The issues that we have, as a school who wants to use audio regularly in the program for students, are those highlighted in the notes for this topic:
We have to buy better sound cards for our Windows computers, and if we want audio to be part of the regular curriculum for all students that means all computers, so this quite expensive. Microphones and headphones are also necessary. Unidirectional microphones are a must in a classroom with a lot of extra noise to compete with and these are becoming harder to source. (Apparently there simply isn’t enough of a market to warrant retailers stocking them.)

The Apple computers don’t even have a way to plug in an external mic without an external sound card. The internal mic is omni directional and will pick up too much surrounding noise for a good clear recording in class.

Mics and sound cards are expensive but we think the benefits for students are worth it. We are even planning to run an Action Research project this year to see if reading and comprehension improves when students regularly listen to recordings of themselves reading.
Digital audio has many applications in classrooms other than music and offers the first practical way for students practise their oral language skills, in a creative and reflective environment where they can record, evaluate and plan for improvements, and make creative adjustments.