Thank God for Audacity, the podcaster’s not so secret weapon.
A Studio At Your Fingertips: 5 Apps Teachers Are Using To Make Student Podcasts
by Diane Adame
Karen Keating’s eighth-grade English students at Lower Dauphin Middle School in Hummelstown, Pa., fire up their laptops and gather a bundle of snowball microphones. With the click of a mouse, their laptops become studios, and they’re ready to record.
Keating’s class is writing, producing and editing podcasts that they’ll submit to the NPR Student Podcast Challenge, and, like many teachers, Keating is using apps to help them make it happen.
As teachers and students around the country are working on their podcasts, we checked in with educators to see what digital tools they’re using.
The good news? Many of these apps are free. They’re also accessible. In many classrooms these days, teachers and students have their own laptops, Chromebooks or iPads. In many cases, the technology is already downloaded and, like Keating’s eighth-graders, students these days are pretty tech-savvy already.
“I can spend time helping students develop their stories rather than explaining the app,” says Amanda Suttle, an English teacher who’s using the Anchor app to help her juniors and seniors get their podcasts in shape at Licking Valley High School in Newark, Ohio.
So, with several weeks still to go before the contest deadline, here are some of the apps and programs teachers told us they’re using. (Of course, we’re not endorsing these, we’re just sharing what we’ve heard from many of you)….