Podcasts: For Kids Sake!
Hello and welcome to Mr. BP’s View. This is episode 1 in a series of 1. Today’s podcast is titled Podcasts: For Kids Sake! Which talks about using podcasts in the classroom. This episode is sponsored by no one and features Terry Bupp-Petersheim. Mr. BP, as the kids call him, teaches Technology and Engineering at Elizabethtown Area Middle School.
Podcast play to the strength of the middle school student. Those 7th graders just love to talk. You can find out if you are brave enough to visit any middle school cafeteria sometime. Podcasts would give the students a way to harness that unstoppable force of talking and call it school work.
Podcasts would also work well as a way for students to summarize an article or let me know what they have learned or want they want to learn. Review work like tickets out the door or book reports could be replaced with a podcast. Now, when they do a ticket out the door, the students usually quickly scribble something down and throw it at me as they fight each other to get out the door. And then, I can’t even read their scribble which makes the ticket out the door kind of useless anyway. If they did a podcast instead of writing to get their thoughts out, they wouldn’t have to worry about spelling, capital letters or punctuation which eludes them in the 7th and 8th grade. Also, they would be motivated to put more thought into the review if they thought other students and other people would be listening to what they have to say in their podcast. If I put a time limit on their podcast, they would have to learn how to summarize the important points.
It is a well known fact that the students listen to their peers more than their teachers. I have an engineering competition club that meets once a week after school for pretty much the whole year. In the club, I will tell the students something every week for a year. I will show them that something from the rules. I will show how that something impacted teams in the past. Then, when we get to the day of the competition, some total stranger will walk up to them and tell them the same something that I have been telling them all year. Without fail, they will turn to me all excited and say “Did you know that?” “Why didn’t you tell us that?” I stutter and fume and bang my head against a wall. So, the mural to this story is to have the students do podcasts so they get the information because they listen to their peers.
