Lesson Plan for Podcasts: The Week in Review

Outcomes

After completing this project, students will be able to:

• Analyze and select events from the past week
• Write and edit a short summary of an online news article for a classroom podcast
• Use a news aggregator

Materials & Technology

• Audacity
• Bloglines
• A weblog or web host to host the podcast
  

Preparation & Technical Skills

Before beginning this project, teachers should open a classroom Bloglines account. This assignment should be done by small groups that rotate throughout the entire year. At the beginning of each week, each member of the group is assigned one of four entries to write and read for the podcast:

• Word of the week - Student chooses a word from the Dictionary.com Word of the Day subscription, reads the definition, and uses it in a sentence.
  
• Quote of the week - Student chooses a quote from the BrainyQuote.com's Quote of the Day.
  
• Sports story of the week - Just for fun. One student gets to do a story on a sports story from ESPN.com.
  
• News story of the week - Student chooses a story from several feeds: USA Today.com, Google News, Yahoo News, and local news from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

At the end of the week, students summaries are recorded using Audacity. Each summary is kept to a maximum of 20 - 30 seconds so that the when exported as an mp3 file, the entire podcast is smaller than 2 mb. After the mp3 is created, the file is then uploaded the class blog.

Evaluation Suggestions

At this point the podcast is still just an experiment. I have plans to change the podcast's format around a little bit. Eventually, the Week in Review will actually be a review of the content we have covered during the previous week in class. I like the idea of having "corners" similar to the ones heard on the Room 208 Podcast. When we reach this stage, I plan to assess how well the students summarize what we have learned throughout the week.

Student Examples

Here is the first ever Room 201 Podcast.

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