Survey of Kid's Podcasting Reactions

Last time I mentioned that the whole individual podcasting project had gone quite smoothly, considering we were working with technology. It seems that I had spoken too soon! The next day I was flooded with reports of tech hiccups. My sage advice was....any guesses??? "Ummm, sometimes Audacity behaves strangely....it's not my fault it's an open source, free program....do what I do when it's acting up....RESTART your computer and try again." Funny thing is, it seemed to do the trick, because everyone seemed good to go after that! Well, there are 2 students having trouble giving me a working copy, but that's getting worked out too.

So, my kids are currently working on their 2nd, and final individual podcast. It's due next week, and I've graded their first projects already - record turn around time, for me, to be sure!!! Anyway, here are my reflections...

• I quickly realized that my rubric needed tweaking. Isn't that ALWAYS the case with rubrics? The next rubric will break down the oral reading skills into different categories so that the project grade puts more emphasis on their oral reading. It will also be more specific in regards to music and production value.
• kids are kids. Some of them did not include the most important part of the pcast - the oral reading segment from their book. Others put too much emphasis on the song they imported - yeah, cause I'm grading them on whether Eminem's song is good or not.
• I could tell that some kids practiced a lot. YES!! Isn't that the whole point of this? It was hard to dock grades from kids who I know worked hard on practicing and yet, still had errors/flaws.
• survey results are quite revealing and useful. I'll try and reflect on them in my next post. If you want to see the questions I posed, you can go to the surveys at www.greatreading.wordpress.com -you should also have access to the latest pcasts there too.

Well, that's all for now. I've got kids coming into class...