Lindsay Gaines, an English teacher at Chatham Central High School, purchased equipment for her students to create podcasts with a grant from the Chatham Education Foundation. Called Podcasts and Possibilities, this project is allowing her students to listen as consumers and also create as producers. As she explains, students in her English 1 honors class have been studying a multimedia dystopian unit. For part of the unit, students listened to Season 1 of the Limetown podcast. Limetown is a dystopian narrative fiction podcast with 6 episodes ending on a cliffhanger.
The students then worked in small groups to brainstorm and plan the storyline for episode 7. They used plot, conflict, characterization, and the element of suspense in their writing of a script including sound effects in true podcast form. After peer editing each other’s scripts, groups recorded, edited, and published their podcast episodes. They also created podcast cover images to go along with their projects.
Gaines said overall the students worked really well together and enjoyed the unit. Of the experience, one student wrote, “This unit was very interesting and something I would not have expected to like. It was fun to get in a group and come up with ideas and put them together.” And another student wrote, “I really enjoyed making a podcast. I thought that all the steps in making the podcast were fun and not too confusing. My favorite part was using the microphone and headphones to record the voice acting.”
Besides being fun to make podcasts, another thing that’s great about this grant is that the podcast equipment can be shared with other classes and used semester after semester. This was one of 29 teaching grants CEF distributed across Chatham County Schools this year, thanks to donor support.