Sharing and creating with podcasts
Rosa Ochoa
Introduction
My name is Rosa Ochoa and I work at St George TAFE which is a college that belongs to the Sydney Institute. I teach ESOL, English to Speakers of Other Languages, and my students are all adult migrants. Usually we get between 15 and up to 18 or 19 students in one group. The youngest I’ve ever had was 17, which is every unusual, but usually they’re from mid-20s up to sometimes 75 even.
I’m using podcasts with them because I started getting them to practise their reading and writing by having a blog and then when they were doing reading and writing I thought I would give them the opportunity of doing listening, and there are not many things with Australian accents. So I started interviewing people from Sydney, and that’s one type of podcast that I’ve got, people from Sydney, and I get the students listening to proficient speakers. Then I’ve got another podcast where my students themselves record short radio programs, talking to each other or interviewing native speakers. Sending people podcasts is where I place the interviews that I myself do with friends or colleagues or anyone that is of interest for the class. Usually what I do is try to make it fit in with whatever topic we’re doing with the class, or if something comes up – a friend of mine who is going overseas, before she leaves I have to interview her. So anything that is a bit interesting.
I try to create worksheets that will help the students – one to prepare for the listening, so I always try to have something like a pre-listening exercise where they only listen and tick and that gives them the opportunity to prepare the vocabulary, or see in writing some of the words, but I never give them the script because I know my students and I think they would go straight to reading the script and I want them to work on listening.
Then I try to create different exercises that make them recycle the language, learn grammatical structures, vocabulary, colloquialisms, and finally I try and give them some writing practice that they will publish in their blogs too. The reason why you see interviews with native speakers is because I felt there was a lack of material available for the students to emphasise the practise with Australian people, because most of my students don’t have enough practise listening to Australian accents. When they go home they speak in their own language and then in class they have me with my accent, so I try to give them extra listening practise and this one is free – they just go home and turn on the computer and they’ve got the podcast there.
Simply creating podcasts
When I first started producing podcasts I didn’t know how to do it, I didn’t have the knowledge or technological skills to do it, but I was lucky enough to go to three sessions of workshops with Stephan Ridgeway at Ultimo TAFE and that got me going. They just introduced us to Audacity and also to MP3 players. I went to the city centre and bought myself an MP3 player and I started playing with that and that’s how I started. At first it took me forever, it was quite complex, but once you do it a few times – the main thing is to learn how to edit and I use Audacity for that and it’s very simple to use. I even try and teach my students how to use it. So that’s how I started.
There are two ways of producing podcasts. One is very simple and that’s why I teach students Audacity. You go to the computer room, you download Audacity which is free, and then with a microphone you can just record and edit. Then you have to turn that file into an MP3 file and there is a program that is free too called LAME and you download and it’s fairly easy. Then you have to host it somewhere and what I use is Our Media which is also freely available.
That’s one way. The other way is you have an MP3 player and that’s really good because that’s portable and that allows you to do programs anywhere you are, and my students used that for the health expo for example. You use the MP3 player recorder and then you edit it with Audacity, put in some music if you want to, and again then you have to have a server to host that MP3 file. It could be Our Media, or if you are a TAFE teacher maybe you can ask permission to upload into the TAFE server. So it’s quite simple, once you learn the rules and how to do it, it’s very simple.
My students listen to the podcasts on Tuesdays when we go to the computer room. My colleagues’ students listen to them too on other days whenever they have the computer room. Then the students are free to listen to other podcasts at home or if they haven’t had time to do it while we were in class, they go home and they do it at home. A few of them, but not all of them, the younger students, know how to put the podcasts on their MP3 players and then they can listen to it wherever they are – travelling, going on the bus, when they are shopping or jogging – but I don’t think many of them do it, only some of the younger ones do it.
Choosing content for your podcast and why it can be an effective teaching and learning tool
When I record a podcast, sometimes I just look at what we’re doing in class and I try to find someone who could talk about that, and that works very well with TAFE colleagues at the end of the course to help them choose the next course. I try and talk to the counsellor or to the special teachers that my students might end up in their classes. That’s one of the ways of doing it. Sometimes I’ve just thought of something interesting and I’ve interviewed someone and out of the podcast they say it would be great to have that person talk to us face-to-face and on some occasions I’ve had teachers giving a presentation of a slide show about the podcast that they have spoken on before, and that’s really interesting.
With Let’s Talk, which is the student-produced podcast, they choose their own topics. We brainstorm for topics and then they choose the topics, they prepare the vote card, the questions, and we try and do it in class because it would be very hard technically, they haven’t got the tools, so mainly we do it in class – every now and then a student does their own podcast or even digital story at home – but basically we do it in class and it’s the topics that they choose.
I try to make my podcasts interesting and engaging in this way. I think my podcasts contribute to the learning of my students because they’re really engaged, they find them real, it’s not a pretend thing, it’s not a role-play – and also they know that they will have the opportunity of creating their own. They are giving them extra listening practice but it’s supported by all the worksheets and it’s input for them to produce writing or a podcast. It’s being holistic that makes it more engaging and I think they like it and they do it and they go home and work extra time on their English.
I try to choose the content for my podcasts, like I said before, by making it relevant for the students because it’s going to be addressing a topic that we’re doing in class. For example, at the beginning of the course we’ve got orientation to TAFE so I want to give them local content – we might go and interview the librarian so that they’ve got listening practise on going to the library. At the end of the course I might talk to the teachers that they’re going to be seeing – like if they decide to do tourism, for example, like one of my students did.
Very often it is something that I know is going to be interesting or different, because it’s something that’s happening to me personally – friends that are leaving and I want to capture them before they go. I try to make it relevant to the topics of the class or interesting. Once I’ve directed my students to listen to one of the podcasts, because that’s what I do on a weekly basis. Sometimes some podcasts are very popular and sometimes they might not be as popular. I know this because I get the worksheets that I tell them to do, I might get them writing about the podcasts and they’re very honest – sometimes they’re very enthusiastic and sometimes they’re not enthusiastic – but I know that in general, even if the content is not as interesting, it’s effective for the learning because they’ve listened to it and they’ve done the exercises and they’ve done the writing. So the evaluation might help me choose the content a bit better the next time, but I think the practise is there for them, whether the podcast is boring or not, but I’d rather they listened to something entertaining and maybe something that is teaching them something else than English.
My students’ reaction to the podcasts is very positive. I think they love listening to different people in Sydney in the podcasts and their stories are so varied that they enjoy the variety and the content in general. But I think they’re really, really enthusiastic about Let’s Talk, which is their podcasts where they produce their own little radio programs and you can read their comments to each other. Sometimes I get emails from students telling me how happy they are that their father in China or their boyfriend or their husband in India or Bangladesh – I’ve had students saying ‘they’re so proud of me because I can talk in English and they can see it now’. So they’re really, really proud of themselves when they produce a radio program.
In a few occasions I’ve had the opposite too – not that they don’t like doing it, but they feel a bit shy and a bit self-conscious. I had one of my students writing a comment in Let’s Talk where he said ‘when I hear my voice I realise that my English is not very good’, but I immediately said it’s normal, it happens to everyone, it happens to me too. But it’s a very good way of practising and they take a lot of care when they are talking and recording and they want to repeat it again and again until they get it right. So I think it’s very good for their pronunciation too.
From creating the podcast I’ve learned a few technical things, like I have to keep reminding myself of doing a check with the MP3 player, because sometimes something as stupid as that, you might spend ten minutes talking to someone and it wasn’t properly turned on. So you have to be extra-careful about doing a test. I think it’s better to keep it short, not too long, because it’s for students after all, you want to create worksheets, you can’t go on forever or you lose their attention, and it’s really hard to edit if you have a long one, you have to spend a long time. It depends on the speaker, but I think ideally five to eight minutes is ideal.
If anyone is thinking of using podcast in class, I can only encourage everyone to do it in a language class because it’s a real tool, it’s a way of getting students practising their oral skills, but it’s real and they’re going to produce a real piece of spoken text that is going to be published. If you can get a colleague or someone who knows about Audacity, someone to teach you the technical side of it, that would be ideal. In our college what we’re doing is the system of mentoring, so I’ve got an hour a week to mentor other teachers who want to learn blogging or wikis or even podcasts. So that’s very good because you’re face-to-face and you can ask questions immediately and get immediate feedback. I think maybe try and engage students – even if they’ve never used a computer they can learn, so get the fear out of them of anything technical. It’s like using cassettes only it’s a different tool, that’s all.
On one occasion one of my students was doing a program on love and marriage, this was a girl, and one of the male students started answering weird things about going overseas and buying DVDs with his boss, and it started to get a bit funny. It was really funny, but the student asking the questions got really embarrassed because the content was starting to be a bit – well, hot for her and for everyone – but I tried to sort of stop him from saying those things. I said to him, look I don’t think we can publish this bit because, well, it’s not appropriate.
I find it very rewarding. It does take a lot of time, so you have to be prepared to dedicate a lot of time to it. Thinking about it is alright because it’s part of the course, but the technical editing and all of that takes a bit of time.
Student-created podcasts and their impact on learning
‘Let’s Talk’ is a Podomatic blog where I publish my students’ podcasts. My students create the podcasts mainly as part of the work in class. We have the computer room once a week and we try and do it then, but often if on any other day we are dealing with a special topic or something special is happening we might all do the recording on another day.
My students usually think of a topic that they really want to use for their radio program. They brainstorm in groups and then they choose their topics. They might change their minds later on. I ask them to prepare the questions they’re going to use to make sure the language is correct. We might get them in small groups again to correct their own language, so we are using the whole exercise for them to learn the structure, the grammar, the vocab. Then when they do their recording I’m usually present with the MP3 player but sometimes I’ve let them do it by themselves and it works really well too. What they do is they record it and if they make a mistake I tell them not to worry, just repeat it until they get it right, and sometimes they want to listen to themselves again to see how it sounds and they want to repeat because the intonation wasn’t right, or the stress wasn’t right or the pronunciation wasn’t right.
Often they have a lot of fun and what I’ve found is that sometimes the best answers are once you turn off the MP3 player, which is a pity. So there’s a bit of self-consciousness I think while we’re doing the recording, but sometimes they forget and they just do it very naturally, and that’s some of the feedback I’ve got from other colleagues, sending me emails saying they’ve been listening to Anna’s podcast on whatever, film reviews, and it sounds so natural – and it’s because they often just interrupt each other and just say what they think on the spur of the moment. I think it’s good for that too, it’s a good way for them to see how they progress from the beginning of the course to later on in the course as they become more independent and a bit more fluent.