Media Reviews

This episode shares some of the first drafts of the students' media review projects. For this project each student chose and reviewed a piece of media. It could have been a TV show, video game, book, CD, song.
The students did prewriting activities to get them to consider their audience's prior knowledge and interests and what to include in their reviews; the ultimate goal was to inform and engage their audience as they shared their tastes and interests.

I was very impressed with the quality of the students' work, and I was also surprised by the variety of their topics.
The four segments in this podcast are:
A review of Hana Kimi, a Taiwanese Drama available on YouTube
Two book reviews--one review of a contemporary novel, Walter Dean Myers' Somewhere in the Darkness and a review of a modern classic, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
Finally, a review of a video game, NBA 2K7.

Listen to Media Review Samples

Audacity Tutorial

Audacity Tutorial

The Audacity tutorial was a hands-on way to teach the students the basic features of the Audacity software. The rest of the projects incorporate student choice and interest, but this one was strictly designed to focus on a variety of features and procedures of the software, so they can get started doing other projects with it. As I described it in the online course, we will use multitrack audio editing software in this course as a word processing program would be used in a writing course. All of the student projects were excellent. I used the first version that was submitted as the sample.

Here is the tutorial with a rubric and here are student samples of the finished product.

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Course Rules

Below are the course rules for the podcasting course. They are in addition to your school rules and policies.

1) Appropriate Language—no profanity or obscenities in the most general sense of the terms will be allowed in any format in this course—in projects or in communication with other students or the instructor.

2) Safety for Self and Others—you are not to mention personally identifying information about yourself on any audio broadcast or accompanying document that is intended for use outside of the Blackboard course—this includes last names, screen names, school name, home address, or any other unique information about yourself or others.

3) Respect for Others—you should communicate with other students in the course with courtesy and respect. Disagreements are allowed, but must be communicated in respectful language.

4) Respect for Intellectual Property—you may not use the intellectual property (audio, text, video, images, etc.) of another person without permission.

5) Consent—You need to get the permission of any person you intend to record and put on a podcast. This person should be informed that the recording is for the public and for your podcast. You cannot use deception or record a person before you get his or her permission.

6) Reciprocity--You should also expect others—inside and outside of this course—to treat you according to these rules. It’s not just about being nice—most of these rules correlated with state, federal, and international laws. For example, no one should record you secretly or take your original material without your permission.

For more information see the Podcasting Legal Guide at Creative Commons.

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