The "Room 208" podcast may just have the youngest production staff in the history of broadcasting. Written, produced and performed entirely by the third- and fourth-graders in Bob Sprankle's class at the Wells Elementary School in Wells, Maine, the podcast — an on-line radio show that can be downloaded to an MP3 player — began in April, has 171 subscribers for its weekly 20- to 30-minute shows and includes regular features like Student News, The Week in Sports and Word of the Week.
The May 27 show, a Memorial Day special, also included the students' responding to fan mail and Bree's Animal Corner, a new weekly feature on which one student read descriptions of pets available for adoption at the Kennebunk Animal Center. That week, the school's public relations officer had come to interview the students about their podcast, and the children, thinking it would make good material, recorded the discussion and included it in their show.
They spoke confidently about scripts, intros, outros, editing, audio loops and background music and showed the officer how the iPod worked. The fourth graders, who will be in a different school next year, said they weren't worried about leaving Mr. Sprankle's class because they planned to return daily after school to continue their work.
"In building this product weekly, the kids are incredibly motivated to read, research, write, and they're telling me they can't wait to get to school," Mr. Sprankle said in an interview for the June 9 episode of Connect Learning, another podcast (not affiliated with his school). "You can't just fake it with this show. You've got to own it."
Mr. Sprankle's experiment with podcasting in the classroom is just one of the interactive technologies some pioneering teachers are using in schools nationwide. Most work teachers have traditionally had students do on-line — searching Google instead of card catalogues, doing exercises on-line instead of in workbooks — has largely been in the mould of off-line coursework.
These days, though, some teachers are building coursework around low-cost, software-based technologies. Some other programs include a Web log shared among students in rural Maine and inner-city students in San Francisco to promote writing and cultural perspective; a voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, exchange among schools worldwide to practice foreign language and debate skills; and an urban planning course that's taught using a virtual world.
When Joel Arquillos, a social studies teacher at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco, started his 11th-grade American history students blogging, he didn't know what to expect. Mr. Arquillos set up a group blog as a joint project with David Boardman's English class juniors and seniors from rural Winthrop High School in Maine for students to post assignments on-line, comment on each other's work and expand their cultural awareness.
At first, the students needed to be prodded to post. But the blog took off when Mr. Arquillos had them write about their neighbourhoods. A student who lives in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco described her feelings about the drug dealing and gang violence in the neighbourhood. The Maine students posted that they had thought neighbourhoods like the Tenderloin were urban legends.
Soon, the students started posting on their own to find out what their peers cross-country thought about various subjects (the structure of the new SATs, good reasons to skip the prom, among many), discussions that almost came to match the assigned writings in volume.
"I want to give these kids the tools to say, 'Hey, my voice is important in this world,"' Mr. Arquillos said after the year-long experiment. "This blog helps me do that."
He was introduced to blogging as an educational tool by Patrick Delaney, Galileo's librarian. Mr. Delaney also helped Mindy Chiang, a Mandarin-language teacher at Galileo, set up a blog for her Chinese-American and Chinese immigrant students to write about and post their experiences for the benefit of fifth- and sixth-graders from schools in Elk Grove and Santa Barbara, Calif., who were studying Chinatowns.
