Giving Students a Voice

Profiles in Success: Shireland City Learning Centre

Year 8 pupils from St Michael’s Church of England High School in Sandwell visited their local Apple Regional Training Centre to learn how to script, record and edit radio programmes using the Mac and GarageBand. The students demonstrated clear progression towards curricular targets, and their creations were posted on the BETT Award-winning Internet radio site, Radiowaves.

The Project and its Aims

The aim of the project was to use Internet radio broadcasting to support attainment in Speaking and Listening and Writing for Year 8 students within English.

As a precursor, the class teacher — together with a Secondary English Consultant from Sandwell LEA — analysed the students’ writing skills and set the following curricular targets:

• All students will improve their ability to use a wide range of sentence structures (Assessment Focus 5 objectives 8S1, 8S2)
• All students will improve their ability to organise whole texts (Assessment Focus 3 objectives 8S8 , 8Wr 5, 8 Wr14).

To help achieve these goals, St Michael’s High School turned to Shireland City Learning Centre, an Apple Regional Training Centre that specialises in bringing learning to life with digital technology. Once at the CLC, the students were tasked with creating a radio schedule for a day. They were split into groups, each equipped with an iBook running Apple’s iLife software suite, and asked to script, record and edit their programmes before publishing them on the Radiowaves site.

How Was the Project Run?

The English teacher from St Michael’s High School met with the Secondary English Consultant to complete a programme matrix, to agree the target group, target levels and objectives of the programme, and to discuss the hardware and software that would be used. The agreed task was “To create a radio schedule and to script, record and edit a range of programmes to be broadcast on Radiowaves”.

Prior to the CLC visits, the English teacher attended a training session on how to record audio using an iPod fitted with an external microphone, and how to use GarageBand to effectively edit a radio show. Meanwhile, the students researched radio programmes, deconstructing the features of talk radio. This activity linked into writing in Paper 1 of AQA GCSE as well as potential English coursework, thereby ensuring progression and continuity from Key Stage 3 to 4. The students also listened to examples of work on Radiowaves and decided what type of programmes would feature in their radio schedule. These included a phone-in, a news report, a magazine feature, a commercial, a sports report and a police drama. Students worked in groups to create and refine their scripts, and rehearsed recording using iPods.

During their first visit to the CLC, the students used iPods to record their rehearsals, then played them back to evaluate their effectiveness. As a result of this initial work, groups independently altered dialogue, inserted dramatic pauses and worked on intonation. Once satisfied, the students recorded their work and imported the resulting audio into Apple’s GarageBand software, which they used to create jingles and edit their recordings.

During their second visit, the students edited their programmes on iBooks, adding sound effects and music. At the end of the session, the students showcased their work. This provided an excellent opportunity for peer- and self-evaluation of their progress, in accordance with Assessment for Learning principles. Pupils wrote short descriptions of their radio piece and selected appropriate images, thus considering audience and purpose, prior to their work being published on the Shireland City Learning Centre Radio Station, eSoundz FM.