Podcasting for English Language Learners

Kim Douglas is working with a Hungarian student new to our school.  She decided that it would be a good idea to record a read aloud so that the student could hear the story with English inflection and in the voice of his teacher.  She and I met on Monday morning, by Monday afternoon I had the podcast in my Google inbox.  Great job Mrs. Douglas!!

She accomplished this by downloading Audacity, a free piece of software to record her voice on her computer.  Ben recommended that she download it from Sourceforge.  She also downloaded the LAME MP3 encoder, which is a bit of software that works in the background and allowed her to turn her recording into an MP3 file.  She plugged in a mic that she borrowed from Suzy, hit the record button, read the book, uploaded it to Google Drive and shared it with me.

Her young Hungarian friend can access the file if she shares it with him, she can burn it to a CD so he can play it on a CD player, or she can make it into a movie with a simple picture and upload it to YouTube to be accessed from any computer anywhere (thanks Jamie Salturelli for that idea!)

She says she won't win any audio book awards for the recording, but I beg to differ.  Listen for yourself.

(This is a widget from Cincopa, which is a podcast hosting site.)

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(Below is a test recording uploaded to YouTube, if you are at school you will have to type in your credentials to 'allow' it to play in the building.  It won't play on the YouTube Education site.)