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The final test is done. The kids stopped bringing materials to school. The weather is nice. It must be the summer…
Think again!!
We still have 2 partial weeks of school.
As far as the PACT test goes…I think most of my kids nailed it. I received a pretty warm response to the test. Of course, I had some students claim that I didn’t teach them anything this year, but those were the ones who didn’t bother to learn my name, let alone learn some history. The kids that wanted to learn something…did learn something. Now, I’m not saying they’ll remember it for next year, but I hope they’ll remember some of the major topics.
My plan for the last days of school are to work on a radio advertisement for a city in South Carolina. With a little begging and handiwork, all of the computers in the Media Center have been equipped with audacity. Let the games begin!!
I’ve decided to start a new project with the kids for the remaining 10 days of school after our state-wide testing is finished. We’re supposed to start next year’s curriculum, which is South Carolina history.
I’m thinking about having the students create a radio commercial about a city in South Carolina. After doing simple research on a city, they’ll have to put together a 60-second advertisement about their city of choice. They’re main goal will be to attract tourism to their city.
The only part I’m struggling with is finding the proper program that has the ability to record, bring in music, and export as an mp3. The only one that I’ve used is audacity. This is a great little program, but it might be a little too hard for most of my 7th graders to get a grasp on.
Eventually, I’ll make them available as podcasts.
I might just have to suck it up and use audacity!!
I hope the kids enjoy this little project…it’ll keep them out of trouble during the last days of school.
In a continual effort to bring podcasting to my 7th graders while still keeping pace with our curriculum, I’ve decided to create an extra credit assignment. The assignment is simple…write a report about any topic that we have discussed in class. Record that project on the audacity software. Add music. Post podcast.
My vision is that every student would create a different topic and our curriculum will be represented by 100 podcasts. I’m sure that will happen this school year.
I unveiled the extra credit project about a week ago and just yesterday a student has recorded the first podcast. This student did his podcast on Adolph Hitler.
This past week was crazy!! I had my students create a VoiceThread. During the week I had to contend with several different obstacles. The first issue came with the jumbled up schedule due to MAP testing. Everyday had different times to meet with the classes. Then I had to deal with a blocked website. That was ok because I had a password to get past the firewall, but I had to put in the password every single time the students went to the website or even refreshed the page. It got old quick. Then my headsets with microphones came just at the nick of time, unfortunately getting them all to work with the computers was another issue. I had to log on to the computers as me and not as student, just to go into the control panel and fix the microphone settings. After all was said and done, only about half of my students finished their projects when I wanted them to finish. There were too many technical difficulties to contend with. Next time I know I’ll be better prepared for this. Even though, towards the end of the week I had a short fuse, I was extremely happy with the out come of the projects. I’ll post the links to the VoiceThreads later on in the week, once everyone has finished.
In addition to creating the VoiceThreads, I had a handful of my students create our podcast for the week. I ended up mixing all of their comments, but they created the entire podcast.
Here it is…
Here is the first official podcast. Although we had a shortened week, we still managed to put something up. I’d like to thank all the kids who worked so hard to help create the podcast.
The Kneighborhood:
The first of many podcasts is up. I am definitely open to suggestions on what content to put on the podcasts. The podcasts are here to have fun and learn something while listening. I hope you enjoy.
See What They’re Saying…