Blog Assignment 4

Flat Stanley Podcast

After reading about the Flat Stanley Podcast, I realized what a great idea it is to do in the classroom. I have heard of sending Flat Stanley around the world, and always wanted to do it myself, but I never thought about using it in a classroom in this way. A group of first graders read the book Flat Stanley by Jim Brown and decided to send their own Flat Stanleys around the country to their relatives and friends in order to receive letters and pictures of Flat Stanley's journey. For the children who participated in the podcast, just sending Flat Stanley around the world was not enough. They decided to put themselves in Flat Stanley's shoes and send themselves around the world. The children picked a location that they would like to be sent to and researched it. They then made a podcast to record what they thought their reactions would be to the different places they were traveling.
I thought that this was such a neat idea, and a great way to introduce a new form a technology to children who probably have never made or even heard of podcasts before. Introducing Flat Stanley to a class, as well as podcasting, is a great idea for all ages. This idea was blogged by Langwiches author, Silvia Tolisano.

The Benefits of Podcasting in the Classroom
Joe Dale blogged about The Benefits of Podcasting in the Classroom, which included a video by Doug Saunders. After watching this video, I saw the importance of podcasting with my future students. When children get stuck doing their assignments in the same ways all of the time, they will start to dislike what they are doing, and probably will not learn what is needed. By podcasting in the classroom, the children will feel as if they have actually produced something that is relevant to their generation. Podcasting also gives the students a way to be more creative with their assignments.
Dale makes a summary using bullets to show some of the main points given in the video. One of them is that podcasting in the classroom "can access the higher order thinking skills in Bloom's taxonomy." It is hard to think of good ways to incorporate synthesizing things in the classroom that students will not get bored with. Podcasting is an awesome way to do so, and can be used in many different ways.


First Graders Create Their Own Real-Along Audiobook
Langwiches author, Silvia Tolisano blogged about another way to utilize podcasting in the classroom. In this post, she tells about how her students created their own read-along audiobook. The teacher helped her students to record the scripts from a book, and then they posted it to their class blog as well as to iTunes. After uploading it to iTunes, the teacher wished to do more with it, so she found a way, with help from someone on Twitter, to make it into a read-along audiobook to use with iBook for iPads, iPods, and iPhones.
I think that this is a wonderful idea, and will be something that I definitely will want to try with my class. I love that the children can be the characters in the book, and get to bring those characters voices to life bu using the voice of the students. This is something that the children can get very excited about. When I try this in my classroom, if I teach children older than first grade, I may have them break into groups to record more than one book. I really love this idea.