Podcasts

Podcasting
Many students are engrossed in music and their portable music devices. What better way to encourage learning than to use the medium that they are already using on a daily basis. We are going to make students their own radio hosts about the subject of history. Students are able to create a show that expresses research created by them. This could be through a story, composed music, talk show with historical guest appearances or talk show like discussion. There are many more possibilities and all of them depend on the creativity of the students with the content. Podcasts are easy to create. All they take is a microphone, a computer, sound recording software (audacity *free*) and a place to publish (wikispaces). There are many different ways to publish these but for class purposes wikispaces will suffice. When creating a podcast series make sure that you have an overall title Like "All About Ketcham's History Class" and include episode titles "Episode 1: Welcome to the Class, an introduction." Pretty easy to get started, so have fun! To evaluate and assess student podcasting a rubric is best suited. You are able to use the generic rubric that I have provided or create a new one that better suits the needs of your class. The purpose of this is to engage learners in a process that they are already interested in for the purpose of understanding the process of historical interpretation.
 * 1) Plug a microphone into your computer
 * 2)  Install an audio recorder for Windows (a free software for audio recorder Audacity ).
 * 3) Create an audio file by making a recording (you can talk, sing or record music) and saving it to your computer.
 * 4) From here upload the file to wikispaces through the file upload option when editing a page. Make sure to create a space for yourself and post under the heading like the teacher example.

