Spooked: Los Gatos and The Experience of a Teacher Using Podcasts

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Trying something new is a calculated risk.  With it comes the possibility of failure.  The fear of failure can be so strong that the willingness to try something new, even when we see the merit, is enough to prevent us from trying in the first place. I often find that teachers are such perfectionists, that they won't take the leap until they have thought through everything, worked out every little detail, and know for certain all will be good.  But remember:

The enemy of progress is perfection.

Don't let your fear of the unknown keep you from taking the leap and trying something.

With all that being said, it does help when you can see someone else doing the thing you're interested in trying yourself.  In the latest Innovation Newsletter, the focus has been on student-created podcasts.  In that newsletter, and partnering blog posts, I've been making the argument for why teachers should consider podcasts as a great way of engaging students and pushing them to go deeper with content they're learning.

Marcos Cortez is a Multimedia Journalism Teacher at Los Gatos High School. This fall he had his students create a podcast called Spooked: Los Gatos, inspired by Spooked Podcast.  He was gracious enough to write a little blurb about his project, provide links to student examples, and answer some of my questions.  Read below what he shared.  It's very insightful.

By Marcos Cortez:
Multimedia Journalism

Spooked: Los Gatos

Whether you are a believer or not, there is no doubt that ghost stories are a part of our
culture. In fact, ghost stories are a part of every culture. From every corner of the world,
there are stories of spirits, demons and the unexplained. For their third project, Multimedia
Journalism students used solely audio to explore our spooky world. Their goal was to find a
ghost story from someone whom they could meet and interview. After conducting the interview(s),
students then did any necessary research before turning the story into a podcast. Students
wrote scripts, added sound effects and edited the stories down to a reasonable time. All recording
was done with the students’ phones and/or inexpensive Lavalier microphones.  With a few
exceptions, most students used iMovie or GarageBand to edit. Almost all sound effects were
provided royalty free by SoundBible. Students either shared their work with me via Google Drive
or posted to Soundcloud and submitted a URL via Canvas. This project was assigned in
October and served as the students introduction to podcasting. Here are two examples of the
their spooky work.

The Demon of Alcatraz

10th graders Natalie Brooks, Bailey Stairs and 11th grader Emily Hagan recount the tale of an
impossible murder. Through research and an interview with former Alcatraz employee, John
Quint, these reporters try to determine if a demon stalked the inmates of The Rock. Note: this
group used Studio One3 audio editing software.

Knocks in the Night

9th graders Priya Correia, Kat Benison and Camille Wilson investigate one of the reportedly
most haunted houses in Los Gatos - the house Priya calls home. Did these reporters capture
the sounds of a restless spirit?

K.O.: Why did you choose do a podcast project with your students?

 M.C.: As with almost all of our multimedia projects, I want students to experience using their
phones for much more than texting and social media. Podcasting is a tremendously powerful
platform for student voice. Not to mention, it is one of the hottest commodities in journalism
 and multimedia right now. Students are very familiar with storytelling through visuals (photos,
 film, art, animation, etc) and traditional text, however, they are less familiar with exclusively
 using audio to get their message out to their audience. The skills they have developed by
 years of analyzing and creating more traditional forms of text certainly translate but do not
 substitute for the skills they need to develop via podcasting. This alone requires a refreshed
 level of focus and critical thinking.

K.O.: What benefit do your students gain from the experience?

M.C.: On a technical level, they are learning how to use new tools. However, the project
 is really about collaboratively editing stories down to their entertaining and engaging essence.
 Students need to perpetually ask themselves, “What do we need cut out? What must stay in?
 What voiceovers do we need to add?” in order to create a coherent, engaging and accurate
 story. Students always ask if they can go “just, like, ten seconds over the time limit”. The
 answer is no. Students need to make the critical and difficult editing decisions. For my money,
  that collaborative decision making process is what this project is about.

K.O.: Over what period of time did they work on the podcast project, and how much of class time vs. homework was devoted to it?

M.C.: From introduction to presentation, the project took three weeks. Students had the
option of finding their own ghost stories or choosing to work with one of two interviews I
had pre-recorded. Roughly 40% of the class used the pre-recorded interviews while the
remaining 60% went out and found their own people to interview. Those who chose the
pre-recorded interview had no work outside of class.

K.O.: What advice do you have for someone interested in podcasting?

M.C.:

1.DO NOT let technology intimidate you. You DO NOT need to be technically savvy to design and
 lead a podcast project. Some of the best teaching moments come when a teacher says, “I don’t
 know. We’ll figure out how to do it together.” Many of the students will have some sort of experience.
 Utilize these folks as a resource.

2. Keep the time limits tight and stick to them. Three to five minutes is actually quite a lot of air time.
 Beyond this, I find that students begin to try and fill up dead space with less than engaging material.
 A tight timeline also requires critical decision making.

3. Clear your Saturday morning calendar, pour yourself a cup of coffee and Google, “How to make
 a podcast with my phone”. You will be inundated with information and resources.

4. Have very structured guidelines with items such as topic/theme, time range, number of interviews/
sources, number of sound effects, intro/outro and scripts.

5. The process is more important than the end product. Unless audio quality is the focus of the
 lesson, poor audio quality is absolutely okay. Case in point, check out the  Knocks in the Night
 example.