Organisers of TES Newsday 2007 have announced the winners of this year's competition. Seventeen schools took part in the new podcast category all of whom received digital voice recorders and USB microphones for their efforts. Helston Community College were joint KS4 winners with Las empanadas en marcha, an ode to local delicacy, the Cornish Pasty, prepared completely in Spanish.
Students Create Spanish Podcast, an article which appeared in the school's publication The Helstonian reported that the Year 11 Spanish students had a great time working together with each other and individually as they composed, scripted, recorded and edited their entry. You can listen to the results of their hard work by clicking here. Well done Helston.
The other winners in the KS4 category were The Minster School in Nottinghamshire with their Spoken Learning project (SLAM) lead by Head of English Paula O'Rourke. In the following radio interview about the Minster podcasts, Paula and some of her pupils talk about the benefits of podcasting and how listening to revision notes or recording poems can help them to learn in a variety of ways.
"A lot of pupils and especially young people today, they listen all the time. That's how they learn. They hear and they listen all the time. So we thought it would be great, if they could use their iPods to logon and listen to the poems being read in a dramatic and meaningful way."
"I think it's the cool factor really, as Miss O'Rourke says. Especially for boys, they don't want to be seen reading soppy love poetry. If they've got their iPod and they can just pretend they are listening to rap music or something. So I think it promotes learning."
"We're much more aware that people learn in a different way. So we constantly look at ... all the different types. You've got visual learners, audio learners, kinaesthetic learners and what's great about this is that all three are involved because they've got something to look at. They've got something to listen to and they've got something to do because they could be highlighting their poems, manipulating it, making notes and annotating it at the same time. So it incorporates and encapsulates all three types. So it's a winner."
Have a listen to some of the KS4 English podcasts and hear what Paula and her pupils are talking about.
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