Blog Post 4

Langwitches

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, known in the cyberworld as Langwitches, was born in Germany, and now resides in São Paulo, Brazil. Ms. Tolisano has about seven pages posted in her blog about podcast. What is a podcast you may ask? According to Webster’s dictionary a podcast is a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for automatic download over the Internet. In this blog post I was asked to summarize three of the podcast posted on Ms.Tolisano's blog.

First Graders Create their own Read Along Book

In this post Ms. Tolisano talks about a podcast she made with a first grade class where they each took turns reading a script she made for the book Dinosaurs Before Dark. In this podcast each student took turns reading the script to create the podcast. Ms. Tolisano says in her reflection on the experience, “It amazes me every time. Students are so engaged, wanting to re-record, if their voice, didn’t sound “just” right.” This shows how interested the students became in the podcast and how great these type things can be to engage the students and make them become more interested and involved in the things being learned.

Listening- Comprehension- Podcasting

In this post Ms. Tolisano describes when she used podcasting to teach her students about the story of Purim. Using podcast she allowed the students to do just like she had done previously and records the post, but instead of putting them in order she allowed the students to do this using Smart-Board technology. This allowed the students to learn about the Purim while having fun editing and making the podcast. Ms. Tolisano really stressed in her blog , “This lesson was about writing a script, listening, comprehension, collaboration, speaking skills, and fluency in the target language.” This podcast shows that things like this can be used for many things in many different ways to keep the students excited about what is being taught.

Flat Stanley Podcast

For Flat Stanley the students use a podcast to tell where they went with Flat Stanley, how they got there and back, and what they did when they got there. They were also required to rent a book from the library, or search the internet about the place they decided to go with Flat Stanley. Through using the podcast the students were excited to create the project and really put forth a good effort.  This shows how 21^st century learning can be very effective even for students of young ages.