Resources

Kim Thomas

Everyone's podcasting these days: the BBC, The Guardian, universities, law firms, banks… But one school can be forgiven for feeling rather blasé about the trend, because it's been podcasting since 2004 – the year the term 'podcasting' was invented, and long before it came into general use.

Radio Sandaig was born when John Johnston, a class teacher at Sandaig Primary School in Glasgow, came across Radiowaves, which helps schools create audio files and put them online. He thought his own pupils would benefit from recording some of their own work, and decided to try it independently.

By the following year, the podcasts were a regular event. When podcasting took off more widely, John converted the original files to MP3 format and created an RSS feed. From the beginning, he says, the podcasts were "child-driven": "The kids would decide what they wanted to do, and at that time I had a quite a lot of pupils who were keen, and we were putting out one a month. They'd often do something that was curricular or suggested to them, but very often they just did whatever ideas they brought to it."

The monthly podcasts, created by children in Years 5, 6 and 7 (mapping onto Years 4, 5 and 6 in England and Wales), covered a wide range of topics. These might include podcasts on the theme of the animal of the month, or the word of the month, or a quiz competition between teachers and pupils, or reports on topics the children had covered. It has reinforced their learning in these areas, but has helped too with key curriculum skills such as talking, listening and reading: "Quite often they'll be reading above their reading age, because if they’re interested in something they'll do their own research and bring it into school."

More importantly, says John, the children enjoy it: "I've done various IT things – video, animation and all the rest of it – but for some reason the podcasting is more fun – they just love messing about with their voices."

John doesn't know how many people subscribe to the podcasts, but they frequently attract comments from places as far afield as Thailand and the United States. On one occasion, every child in the school from Year 3 to Year 7 contributed a verse to a poem, which ended up 150 verses long. Some of the children then made a podcast of their verses. "The podcast got picked up amongst the educational bloggers around the world, and got a lot of good commentary," says John. "It then got picked up by a high school teacher in the US who wrote to us and said, 'Can we take your podcast and turn it into a play?' She did, and her students wrote a play around the poems, and they made puppets, wrote a script and videoed themselves doing it. They sent that all over to us in Scotland, and we performed some of it and videoed it, and blogged the video, and that got a lot of publicity as well."

Blogging has taken off at Sandaig. John keeps his own blog on the school website, in which he talks about how he's using ICT in the classroom, while the children, he says, use blogs in all sorts of different ways: "Last year, my class all had their own blogs; each week they had some set task they would blog about, but they could also put things on about their rabbits, or their Lego, or whatever they were doing at home that they were interested in. We've got poetry blogs – and every so often you'll get 50 poems at once – and we've got a blog for an eco-skills initiative, so there are kids who are on the committee for that, and part of their responsibility is to post to the blog."

In primary schools, says John, it's important for children to have a chance to display their work, and blogging enables them to present their written work to the outside world. It can also be used for communication with parents on the school's annual trip to Holland: "We get a great response from the parents, because they can see what's happened to their children and keep up with them."

As well as motivating the pupils, blogging has enabled them to pick up important life skills, he adds: "They're learning to think a bit about the way the world's going to work. Their world to a large extent is going to be online. Hopefully by doing blogging and podcasting, and talking to them about responsibility, that'll help them avoid some of the pitfalls of social networking. I don't censor them; I just talk to them a lot about how responsible they have got to be, because they are representing the school."

John is also encouraging the children to use pictures as well as text. In a new picture gallery on the website, one child each day is picked to take half a dozen photographs in their garden, which are then posted onto the site, with the aim of both tracking changes in the garden as part of the eco-skills project, and helping the pupils think about the importance of images as a tool for communication.

A new development since January this year has been the Sandaig wiki, in which Year 6 pupils write about what they've learned in science: "The tasks are challenge-based learning; the pupils are given experiments to do and they've got to decide how to record them and then post them to the wiki. Some of them make PowerPoints and put them into SlideShare so they can be viewed on the web. Some of them record on audio, some of them record on video." It helps, he says, to motivate children who are daunted by the idea of writing a whole report.

The Sandaig website is a testament to just how much work John has done with the children, showcasing several blogs, as well as wikis, podcasts and video clips. And there's even the Sandaig Jukebox, where you can hear tunes the children have composed themselves on Garageband. It's all been a great way of engaging the children, says John: "A few years ago people would say the buzz of doing something new is going to wear off children in a few years as they get used to the technology and it won't be such a motivator – but it hasn’t happened yet."

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