Good Practice - Case Study

Dewhurst St. Mary CE Primary

School No: 359

Podcasting & Blogging on a School Trip

Children on a residential school trip created daily podcasts and posted online videos and photos to keep their families up to date with their adventures.

Dewhurst Radio

Dewhurst St. Mary is a C of E Primary school in Cheshunt. One of the year 6 teachers, Liz Wedge, has been experimenting with using audio and creating podcasts with progressively more ambitious projects. Early on in the 2007-2008 year the school signed up with Radio Waves. This is a subscription based service that allows a school to post sound recordings, videos, image and text to their own mini-site within the Radio Waves website. They can also post up reader polls and invite readers to submit comments, rather like a blog.

After several podcasts, including a football report and a radio show called Duck Radio, the Year 6 have used the facilities available within Radio Waves to broadcast up-to-date news items from a school trip to a PGL centre in Osmington Bay, Dorset. Their purpose was to keep the families back home informed about how the trip is going and the different activities that they have been taking part in.

The school’s mini-site can be edited from anywhere with an internet connection, so during the week away the children created a daily page that included a radio-style sound broadcast, a short video file created with a Digital Blue Movie Creator, digital photographs and a sentence or two about the day’s activities. A ‘talk back’ section on each page gave the parents the opportunity to comment on what they had seen and heard.

The sound recordings were made with a portable MP3 recorder, and edited with the free program Audacity. The sound, video and image content was uploaded to Radio Waves from a laptop taken on the trip. The parents’ response to this innovative and exciting way of communicating was very positive, and since returning the children have had the opportunity to relive their experiences by listening back to their own podcasts, and watching their online videos.

There are now a number of online services that enable schools to set up their own sites and communicate in this way. They are usually simple to set up and use, and provide a motivating and engaging ways for children to communicate through ICT, using technologies they know and enjoy.