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.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Podcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.