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| Posted "I Can" Statements for the Activity |
Today I worked with a group of two fifth grade classes recording and editing a breaking news radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor. We used Audacity to record and edit. The students had some experience back in December when I worked with them introducing them to the tool. I wrote about my experience in a previous blog post. The December activity was designed to be fun and show them the basic tools they would need in the program to record and add sound effects.
The activity today was designed to show them the structure of a "breaking news story" on the radio in the context of their Social Studies curriculum. Each group will be working on their own scripts within the next two weeks with their final project due March 24.
I worked with the teacher Mrs. Gannon with our sample recording, as a way of walking through what we thought might work with students. We decided to use the Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How structure to collect data from from a Pearl Harbor article on the Ducksters site. Below you will find her loose notes within that structure. She showed it to students because they tend to put too much information in the initial stages of research and lose steam when it comes to what they have to produce (in this case as script).
The teacher then showed students our first pass of the script based on our data collection and noted that we continued to edit once we did our first read aloud. Again, we were trying to show the importance of revising ones work. We recorded the script as written below.
I took our recording home to edit and noticed that it didn't flow well within the context of the sound effects and edited the script to better match what we had. We showed that to students as well in an effort to model how good writers continue to revise their work. They got a chance to listen to our broadcast.
We did learn a lesson with the first group and decided that the script needed to have what sound effects went where. We noticed they were a bit all over the place with where they were placing them (apparently my video instructions weren't super clear...which was good feedback).
Students were partnered up by the teacher and practiced reading their scripts twice with each person taking a turn as Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 (they then had to agree who was taking which part...several partner groups rock, paper, scissored that decision out 🤣).
Students recorded twice. We wanted each child to independently edit so they recorded once on their device and then once on their partners device. They actually wound up re-recording a lot as they made mistakes. I have a class set of iPhone ear buds with microphones that they used to help capture their voices (we use alcohol wipes before and after use). We broke the group into two room (they have an unused classroom). The teacher and I stayed in one room and I roped a co-worker into the project with me, so she took the other groups.
To help students in the independent editing phase I put together a Google folder of all the resources they would need. They had three sound effects in the folder: Big Band Music (I downloaded some swing music from the FreePlayMusic site), Morse Code (which I got from the Discovery Education library), Air Horn Siren Battle Background noise (also from the DE library). I also included an instructional screen cast I made so students could work independently as they got finished recording the script (designed to have students watch, pause, do).
My co-worker, Estee, the teacher, and I helped as issues came up but the video was pretty sufficient for most students. Many of them remembered our December activity so they were able to jump in without wasting much time.
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| Me |
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| My Co-Worker Estee |
If you are interested in hearing one of the finished projects check this Completed Student Recording. It is about 2 minutes long.
The students have now been tasked to research one of the other nine World War 2 Battle Articles on Ducksters and create a script to record and sound effects that can be used (minimum 3...maximum 4). I am coming back to help with the technology piece on the 23rd and 24th of March. So I am hoping to report back at that time.
In my nine years as a tech coach this is my first Audacity project with students and I went into it knowing it would be a learning process for me, as much as the students.
The teacher absolutely LOVED it and has said it is going to be part of her WW2 unit going forward. It covered so many skills from research, to writing, to revising, to speaking...not to mention all the tech skills acquired.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in the comments or tweet them out tagging me @atechcoachlife.
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