7 Great Student Podcasting Activities using Synth in the Classroom
Are you thinking about doing something just a bit different this year with your students? If so, why not consider enhancing your classroom, just a little bit, with a few simple lessons involving audio or video? In this post, we will take a look at 7 great student podcasting activities using an audio/video recording application called Synth. The lessons below are some that you might even be doing with your students today that could be given a bit of a facelift by introducing podcasts and educational podcasting.
For the last 10 years (give or take) teachers have been putting the creation process in the hands and minds of their students. Just about every device that your students have these days has some type of audio or video recording device on it. The question is not “should you” rather than “how could you not” invite your students to become publishers.
Why should students be creating with audio and video?
In today's classrooms, the learning is now, more than ever, in the hands of the students. If a teacher stands in front of the class and lectures 100% of the time, students often are turned off or tuned out of the daily lessons. However, when you give students a problem and ask them to document their learnings, suddenly, they not only become detective, but they become documentarian as well.
Let's take a look at some student podcasting activities that you can do in your classroom this year using Audio or Video. Please check back to this post often as we will be not only adding to this list but linking to fully produced lesson plans that you can download and use in your classroom.
How Do You Use Synth?
Using Audio / Video in the Classroom
- Audio Podcasts for Sporting Events
- Are you hosting the big game this weekend? Wouldn’t it be great to use Synth as a way to recap each quarter of action? Because Synths are tiny pieces of audio, they can be easily consumed by those in the stands and at home to stay right with the action each week.
- Video Podcast Announcements
- Synth is a perfect tool for morning video announcements that can be subscribed by both teachers and parents.
- Writing Assignment Replacement
- Recently, I have been using Synth as a replacement for having students write 5-Paragraph Essays. By creating multiple podcasts and joining them in a sequence, students can replicate the Intro-Body-Closing style of longer writing assignments. This allows those students who are more auditory or visual learners to enjoy learning.
- Musical Playing Test
- As a music teacher for more than 15 years, it was extremely difficult to have each student come in and do an individual playing test. Synth provides an easy way for each student to take an audio/video recording of themselves and send it to the teacher for quick and simple assessments.
- Student-Created Video Tutorials
- Many students and teachers know the value that a good screencasting application such as Screencastify can have in creating flipped classroom videos, however, the advantage that Synth brings over traditional screencasting applications is that it can be also used as a document camera to create short videos of things in real time and in real space.
- Website Introduction Videos
- Do you have a webcam? Why not use Synth to create an introduction video for your next website project!
- Intro/Exit Tickets
- As referenced on the Synth Blog and Free Tech for Teachers, Synth is the perfect application to help check for understanding at the beginning or end of classes.
Conclusion
If you are looking to spark creativity in your lessons this year, there are several great ways that you can introduce educational podcasting to your students. Synth is a fantastic application that not only is free to use but provides professional level features such as transcription and episodic recording to give your students the confidence they need to be able to present themselves and their ideas in an audio or video format.
For this reason, we have created a new channel to help you learn how to bring podcasting into your classroom.
We would love to learn how you are using Educational Podcasts in your classroom. Please leave a comment below or Tweet to us @PodcastingToday.
For more information, please visit www.PodcastingWithStudents.com.
About the author, Jeffrey Bradbury
Jeff Bradbury, creator of TeacherCast, and father of the famous @EduTriplets Thanks for checking out TeacherCast today. Please take a moment to find me on all of my Social Media channels!