Name Podcast using GarageBand: A Great Back to School Activity

This simple, yet powerful project allows students to share a little bit about themselves at the beginning of the year. At the same time it allows students to jump into some simple audio recording and editing using GarageBand.

This year I had my fourth grade students do this activity the second day of the year. I knew the computer lab would soon be full of classes taking their Fall benchmark assessments so I took the opportunity to do this as a back to school/get to know you activity. I also wanted my students to learn how to make a simple audio recording in GarageBand at the beginning of the year because this is a foundation skill they will use all year long in my class.

How can I take time to do this type of project?

I make time for important projects like this for a number of reasons. One powerful way I can use these recordings as a teacher is to use the recording as a beginning of the year baseline for oral language development.  This project is an easy way for me to assess students oral language at the beginning of the year.  If you have English learners in your class like I do, using GarageBand, Turn and Talks, and cooperative learning is extremely beneficial to their gaining English language proficiency and fluency.  In the future, I will post some additional GarageBand projects, including an engaging project students can use to practice reading fluency without even realizing it!

The Basics

This is a very straighforward activity.  Using the letters of your first name, students will create a podcast that shares about who they are. For example:

Hi! My name is Matt.
The M stands for mountains because I like hiking and backpacking in the mountains. The A stands for apples because I grew up in the apple capitol of the world. T stands for teacher because I love helping people learn as a teacher. T also stands for Traffic because I hate getting stuck in traffic. That’s all about my right now. Thanks for listening!

Listen to this sample:

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Here are samples of student created podcasts.

Activity Steps

These are the steps I went through this year with my students:

1. Listen to examples (see below) and have students figure out what is going on.
2. Explain the task. If you are using a rubric, now is the time to share that and go over it with the students.
3. Students write their Name Acrostic.
4. Demo GarageBand (or Audacity) and show your students how to do a simple recording (see below). Also show them how to add an musical intro and outro.
5. Give students time to work on their recordings.
6. (Optional) Take a picture of each student so they can make an enhanced podcast using their photo.
7. Put all the podcast files on one computer. Make any final edits.
8. Export and publish the podcasts.

Keynote Presentation

Here is a Keynote presentation I used this year to get the students listening and thinking about this activity. Because this presentation was converted to flash some of the transitions are a bit slower than normal.

http://bluesofamedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Name-Project.flv

How to Use GarageBand to Create this Podcast

Watch this video tutorial and learn how to make this podcast using GarageBand.  Feel free to have your students watch this video as well.

Helpful Tip

Noise can definitely can be an issue whether you are in a classroom or in a computer lab.  Our school has some Logitech Headsets that we can checkout and use.  They work great and allow students to record themselves without picking up all the other noise from the room.

If you try this project with your students, please let me know in the comment section below.