For the past year or so, there have been occasional news stories about entrepreneurial individuals who have used podcasting (making digital audio recordings that can be uploaded to the Web, downloaded to mp3 players, etc.) to create audio tours with a uniquely personal viewpoint. Some are available as free downloads, and others cost less than $15.

A September 30 article in The New York Times discusses these tours.

These tours could just as easily be created by students to give a tour of their school, neighborhood, or city. (In fact, there’s a chapter about audio tour planning in my upcoming book, Podcasting at School, which came out yesterday … nudge, nudge).

The Times article poses these questions that might be relevant to project planning:

Should tours guide you across every street or assume you can find your way between the attractions they describe? Will people pay for smoother production quality? And should the narrators be local characters, casual conversationalists or smooth-talking Mr. Voiceover?

Here are some other questions to ask in planning this project:

1. Will the tour include interviews?
2. Will the recording include ambient sound, such as cars honking, birds chirping, and more?
3. Can literary excerpts be integrated, such as a poem about the neighborhood written by a student or local author (with permission)?
4. Will the tour have opening and closing music?
5. How many narrators will it have?
6. Will listeners hear it in their car (in which case, burn it to CD) or on their mp3 players (post the digital file online)?
7. How will I be sure that student and interviewees’ privacy is protected?

Here’s a challenge for you:

Gather a group of students interested in creating a tour. (It could be part of a local history unit in school.) Have them plan and record the tour. Post it online, then add a link to the tour in the comments section below.

Happy podcasting!

Well, I woke up this morning and realized that after 18 months of work, my book Podcasting at School is being released today, complete with a foreword by the fabulous Diane R. Chen.  While my author copies have not arrived yet, I am full of anticipation.  Plus, I have managed to keep the dedication a secret from the dedicatees (??) since the manuscript was turned in in July, and I’m dying to see the look in their eyes!

We make a big deal about student publishing in our library.  If you have a piece of writing you’d like to donate to our library, and you tell us it is your best work, we put a barcode on it and add it to our student-authored section.  So I have a few first grade writers who think it is perfectly normal that I, too, would be donating my book to the library!

So when I heard last night about a project in which students interviewed immigrants and created a book from them, I was primed to be interested in it!  What’s even better is that the project, run by What Kids Can Do (WKCD), is offering a complimentary copy of the students’ work to educators and has additional educational resources online.  Check it out here.

Gathering oral histories is a fantastic way to use podcasting to connect people and document memories.  In one of the Podcasting at School chapters, I wrote about how we have adapted the oral history interview models of StoryCorps and the American Folklife Center’s Veterans’ History Project at the Library of Congress at our school.

We set up computers in the lobby of the media center and invite family members to interview one another during our spring student-led conferences.  It was such a treasure to watch parents and kids talk to one another!  We gave parents the option of how to receive the finished interview: on CD, online, or via email.  We were asked to repeat it again this year so that families could build a set of recorded memories over time.

And, even better, it gave working parents a chance to see our library as a place for connections and for technology use, instead of just as the Book Fair.

Please consider submitting a proposal.  Because this year’s August conference is in Berkeley, California, it’s a great way to get an international perspective for the price of a domestic airfare!

Here are some useful links to help you out:

IASL Home Page: http://www.iasl-online.org
Conference Home Page: http://www.iasl-online.org/events/conf/2008/index.htm
Call for Papers Details: http://www.iasl-online.org/events/conf/2008/call-papers.htm
Online Submission Facility: http://141.217.97.6/ocs/
Instructions for Online Submission:http://www.beverlyschool.org/iasl/submissioninstructions.pdf