Authentic Learning
Increasingly, too, podcasting is becoming incorporated into classroom projects as a way to use twenty-first-century technology to build twenty-first-century skills. With an inexpensive recording attachment for the MP3 player, students can create their own podcasts. They can make audio versions of their school writing—research reports, essays, poems, short stories—and they can experiment with editing software to add music, sound effects, video, and animation.
Jamestown Elementary in Arlington, Virginia, has been a leader in such projects. Recently, Jamestown third-graders adapted written reports on the monuments of Washington, D.C., into a multimedia narrative history of the nation’s capital. Each student made a contribution to the project, as audio engineer or director or on-air presenter. In addition to gaining experience with the latest digital technology, the students came away with a clear “demonstration of learning,” an actual product that resulted from the lesson.
Said one third-grader, “I think the best thing about this is being able to tell people what we do at our school and how cool Jamestown is.”
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Authentic Learning
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Working in groups of three, the students moved throughout the Mammal Hall, pausing to interview each other and answering the questions they formulated during their first podcast.
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