Final Project

Here is my final project, a podcast and a wiki. 

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As seems to be typical for me regarding technology, in the eleventh hour, things didn't go the way they were supposed to.  The good news is that every opportunity is a learning experience.  I'm going to publish this post since it is due for my class, but in the mean time, I'm going to find some answers...  For example, I've been having trouble changing the autoplay setting in the html code and publishing on the blog.  Strange.  I wanted to upload it as an audio file to this blog but was having trouble with the html being accepted.  I've also included my website http://www.readwriterun.com/ since the audio file is located on the Door in Wall page under Junior Great Books.  That way, it doesn't have to be downloaded to itunes - it can just be listened to.

In the past, when the students have read The Door in the Wall, I've had them act out a "crime" scene from the book.  I've had them act it out as though they were a newscast with interviewers on the scene interviewing the victims and others involved in the crime scene.  I thought that making it in to a podcast would be a terrific extension of the learning process.  The story takes place in the Middle Ages, so at first the students asked they had to speak in "thee's and thou's" like in the book.  Then we had to discuss how we could have a modern newscast when they didn't have that kind of technology.  I explained that doing a modern day type newscast would be our way of exploring and understanding the characters.

Our class is under certain time constraints so we had to work efficiently.  The students were each assigned a character.  They had to come up with their character's responses to questions they thought an interviewer might ask them.  Those who were assigned interviewer roles were asked to come up with questions for those they would interview.  Then we matched up the questions with the answers, filling in where necessary.  One student was assigned the role of news desk person - this person introduced and closed the program.   

For the actual production, I recorded the newscast on video, downloaded it to mediamill and made an audio only  podcast derivitive.  As usual I discovered a few things along the way.  One thing I discovered is that Microsoft Word and Google Docs are not necessarily always compatible.  The beauty of using Google Docs was that I could collate the scripts at work and then continue editing them at home.  I thought that I could simply cut and paste a word document into my google doc document but I could not.  I had to download my google doc document as a word document, then do my cutting and pasting on word.  It worked fine, I just found the process interesting.

I found that making a newscast that was made into a podcast really engaged the students.  They actually did more writing than I had been having them do in the past when I simply had them act it out.  And the writing didn't seem laborious.  They were imaginative and creative with their scripts.  The students were also creative with their characterizations.  Some of the characters in the story that they represented hadn't even been fully developed in the book, yet the students brought personality to the characaters through the process of making a podcast.  I will definately try to incorporate the use of podcasts in other novel studies that we do.  The other Junior Great Books novels that we study are included in the wiki I have made for them: http://waysmooth.pbworks.com/w/page/30814313/FrontPage