Orange Grove Primary School
Orange Grove, Western Australia - A small school of only 120 students, Orange Grove Primary School has all the outward appearances of being a quiet little school nestled away in the green foothills of outer Perth. Inside the school, though, there's a movement underway in Paul Fuller's combined Year 4 / 5 class. Students are discovering how their teacher's Apple MacBook and iLife suite of software underpin an entirely new and exciting tool for learning... podcasting.
Building Enthusiasm
One of the most common challenges for teachers is trying to build enthusiasm around learning areas that can be seen by many students as boring and far from exciting - much like watching grass grow. Interestingly, it's a variation on that theme to which Fuller and his students apply the podcasting approach.
"As a science experiment we created a series of tests to measure the growth of mould on a range of typical lunch-box sandwiches," Fuller explains. "We had a variety of different sandwiches, with some in the refrigerators, others left in the classroom but sealed in a lunch box and others in a freezer."
Over a period of six weeks, the students monitored the growth of mould on the sandwiches, noting down the results that would be used as the basis for a write-up of the experiment. "This is where the real benefits of applying podcasts to the subject came to the fore," Fuller says. "If I'd told the students to simply write a report on the subject, I doubt very much that the majority of students would have delivered anything of real substance.
"But getting them to write it up as a podcast script, the results were outstanding. Students who would otherwise have - at best - written a paragraph were finding themselves being told by me to cut back on the amount of words. The thing is that they were applying their work to something that would be broadcast globally and - importantly - to their parents," Fuller continues smilingly.
With podcast scripts written, students take it in turn to record voiceovers using the Apple iLife GarageBand software. Once recorded, the scripts are edited, music is dubbed in and when given the final nod of approval from teacher and students, it is published automatically to the Web and on the iTunes site for global audiences to access. From there, it joins a growing library of Orange Grove podcasts that are subscribed to by thousands of listeners around the world.
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