Unit 7

 This was a short unit, covering 3 readings addressing podcasts and other audio-based assignments and their benefits. The first article is by Deirdre Faughey, titled "Can We Do This?": Cocreating Curriculum with a Twenty-First-Century Mindset. This article talked about opening up classrooms to the 21st century, in embracing technology and gadgets, and having students do projects and assignments using this technology. The teacher/author talks about their fear of having the students do a final paper on Romeo and Juliet, which they had just read, because she thought that the students would be half-hearted about it. She instead chose to introduce the students to podcasts, and expose them to the value of audio recordings to organize and present information for an audience. She shared examples of podcasts with students, talked about music groups and other relevant topics that would engage the students and help them see the value in podcasts. She then provided the students with planning sheets to use in preparation of their own podcasts, before releasing the students to work together to create their own podcasts on Romeo and Juliet, however they would like. The student involvement and interest in the project was much higher than if they had done a paper, and the students also enjoyed doing the project, which can hardly be said for a typical essay assignment. This article adds additional emphasis to the value that multimodal assignments can bring to the classroom, especially to students who wouldn't normally be engaged with reading and writing: "Too often struggling readers are assumed to be work avoidant and uninterested, [but] the podcast project not only engaged students in learning but also helped to cultivate positive academic identities" (74).

The next article of this unit is titled Designing Literary Discussions With Podcasts, by Brooke Bianchi-Pennington. This is a short article compared to the last but covers most of the same concepts. The author talks about how he introduces podcast units to his students, provided them with a free website where they can record their podcasts, and provided them with Soundcloud links to allow them to share their podcasts for others to hear. He talked about drafting permission forms for students' parents so that the students could share their podcasts publicly on Soundcloud, and provided his readers with the actual links to hear the students' final podcasts (neat touch). He nears the end of the article by providing several podcast channels that he recommends, giving a variety of options to pick from such as philosophical, history-based, and fictional. The article is closed by addressing what all attributes the assignment covered, doing a play-by-play of each step and what was covered. So I would say that this article was a little less useful than the previous one, only because of how short it was and how much the two had in common. However, it did provide links to his students' projects, as well as sources to other podcast channels, podcast recording sites, and some small details that weren't mentioned in the previous one. I can't say that I learned anything in particular from this article compared to the previous one, but I can see myself using the student podcasts that he provided as examples for my future classes to give my students a feeling of connection listening to other students their age doing a podcast project.

The last article of this unit is titled "Building Literacy Radiolab-Style" by Michele L. Haiken. This article talks about the benefit of podcast creation to speech and debate skills, as well as organization necessary to properly relay this information. The author provides readers with information on what all they need in order to create a Radiolab-style podcast, including hardware and resources, which is beneficial in terms of providing all necessary items needed to get started and implement such an activity in a classroom. She then breaks down the next week's worth of activities, including organization and planning for the students, and provides several rubrics/sheets that she gives the students to fill out and plan with. She then talks about how she assessed their final podcasts and what standards were covered through the project, which were not addressed in the previous two articles. Overall this was an informative article in different ways than the previous two. I feel that one article that covered all aspects of these 3 would have sufficed, but that's easier said than found. 

These were valuable articles overall, but I do think that they overlapped and repeated themselves on several occasions. I still plan on saving all 3 of them for my own future lessons and schooling however, because there is no reason not to.