Blog Post #4

1st Graders Create Own Read Along Books

Ms. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano wrote this blog named 1st Graders Create Own Read Along Books(1st Graders Create Own Read Along Books). This blog talked about how Ms. Tolisano spent time with some first graders, while their teacher was not there. She had them listen to an audio about a dinosaur book, and afterwards she interviewed them in a pod-cast. The first graders enjoyed being recorded so much that they wanted to be re-recorded and they even tried to change their volume, fluency, pitch, and speed of their voice. She used Garageband to record the children in the pod-cast.

I really love this blog post! I think that pod-casting with young children is an awesome and fun way to get them acquainted with technology. I also believe that having the children follow along reading the book with an audio book is a wonderful way to help them learn to read and it also helps them learn to spell when the words are right in front of them. Children grow up around technology and, are so smart with technology, that they would have no problem learning how to use pod-casts and how to access them on the internet.


Podcasting with First Grade

This blog post was also written by Ms. Tolisano. This blog is called Podcasting with First Grade(Podcasting with First Grade). This blog Ms. Tolisano also pod-casts with some first graders. She has them read the book Vacation under the Volcano by Mary Pope Osborne. She has her male students write interview questions for Jack and her female students write interview questions for Annie. Afterwards she chose some questions from her students and then has them pod-cast asking the questions and answering questions. She also records the pod-cast on Garageband.

I really thought that this is a great way to let the children get involved with their education. The children really seemed to enjoy pod-casting and getting fed-back from all over the world. I feel that this is an awesome way to get children of any age interested in learning and in technology. The first graders in this class really enjoyed hearing themselves and recording for the podcast. I will definitely do this with my class when I start to teach, because I love technology and I feel that it is a great way to learn and to teach.


Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting

This blog was also written by Ms. Tolisano called Listening-Comprehesion-Podcasting(Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting). This blog post is about second graders who are reading Purim and trying to learn Hebrew. The second graders in this class were trying to learn Hebrew, so Ms. Tolisano had them record a sentence from the book in Hebrew on Garageband. The point of this was not for them to learn how to use Garageband or how to pod-cast, because they already knew how to do that from their previous year, but to help them learn Hebrew and to hear how the words should be to pronounced and how the whole sentence sounded together. Ms. Tolisano had the students record their sentence in pieces to help them learn the language and how to speak it. She had them put the pieces of the sentence together on the SmartBoard to show how the sentence should be structured and how the sentence would sound together.

I really believe that this is a great way to teach a child a foreign language. I know if I could have been able to manipulate the language on the SmartBoard, it may have been easier to understand and easy to learn. Learning another language is hard and can be confusing, and I feel that letting the students hear the language spoken on a pod-cast from people who are fluent in that particular language is an awesome way to help them learn the language.