Thing 5: Audio Tools

The second tool I used for Thing 5 was Anchor. This was the platform we used to create the student podcasts for the NPR podcast challenge. This a free tool that I learned about at the Innovation Summit in Boston. I was able to see it in action and thought I would love to try it out, both personally and with my students. It is a simple tool to use, with all the basic feature you will need. The only thing I find confusing about it is the main toolbar. It is not always intuitive for me to know how to get back into my episodes, but certainly isn't difficult, just cumbersome to navigate.

When actually making a podcast episode on Anchor there are four main options for adding content. You can record directly in the app, you can add messages left by your listeners using the Anchor Mobile App., you can upload audio files from your computer, and you can add sounds from their library. In order to add any content you simple drag over and drop your content in the workspace on the right side of the screen. Once audio content has been added to the workspace, there is a basic feature to split and cut audio. Once you are done creating your podcast it is shared to six different platforms: Anchor, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Breaker, Pocket Casts, and Spotify. You can also download the episode and upload it to Sound Cloud or other podcast platforms.

As mentioned in the last blog, our students took part in the NPR podcast challenge. They worked in groups of three to create a podcast using Anchor. I gave the students a brief tutorial on the tool and spend several lengthy sessions discussing the content that goes into building a meaningful podcast and the important role that planning plays in building a successful podcast. The one challenge about this tool is that it isn't collaborative so only one student can be building at a time. Overall, our students did troubleshoot around this, but it would have been beneficial if they could all build at once.

Our students, spent independent work time, researching, conducting interviews, building narratives, and selecting meaningful audio sounds that would elicit emotions and tone during their podcast. Students were tapping into their critical thinking and digital literacy skills to find ways to include content elements that were not readily available to them. Students could be found using Zoom to interview people that weren't in our physical location and brainstorming ways to include sounds that weren't in the library that was provided to them on Anchor. It was fun to watch them design and create utilizing strategies, skills, and information that we have taught them. This was also an extremely eye-opening experience for us as teachers, because we were able to recognize some skills we now need to work on developing.  Students struggled with the abilities to collaborate and communicate with one another effectively. We spent a lot of time as "coaches" guiding them through their group work, helping to model and showcase effective skills for cooperative work. This is something that we are going to continue to hone and develop in our next assignment with them.

Once our students finished their podcast we downloaded them, and uploaded them to Sound Cloud, based on the requirements set by NPR. We then spent an additional class period having a reflection discussion and implementing individual reflection responses using Google Forms.

This was an amazing student-centered experience that was engaging and meaningful to our students. It was powerful as we watched students apply many of the information, digital, and media literacy skills that they have been taught throughout their time in the elementary school. Although the enrichment teacher and myself co-designed and taught this unit for upper elementary, this podcasting tool could be used with students as young as Kindergarten.

Here are links to the student podcasts:

Berlin Wall

Poverty

Perspectives on Gender Inequality

From Kid to Parent

In addition, I have been using this tool with Amy Carpenter, a fellow librarian to build our own podcast called Growing Librarians. We just launched our first episode: How to Grow as a Librarian and Stay Sane. We are still working to learn the tool and adjust audio ourselves, but we were pleased with how the first episode came out. One thing that we did include in our podcast that I didn't show to the students, is add an audio file from Google Voice.  Once you set up a free account on this, you will get a free phone number that people can use to call in a question or record a passage. This then can be uploaded into Anchor and be built in as a segment. We used this to  have librarians, phone in questions. It was extremely easy and effective.

Here is a link to our podcast if anyone is interested in listening and of course we would love your feedback!