During internship I purchased several stories that were accompanied with audio CDs, with the author reading their story. I purchased these and ordered several from media services because I had two students on Personal Program Plans who needed this slight adaptation to help meet their learning needs. For the one student who could not read, it was a way to get her to work independently during D.E.A.R time as she used the pictures as her guide and was still able to enjoy quality literature. They were also useful when our Educational Assistant would work with the individual students, helping them follow the text along with the audio.

Recording literature and having students follow the text along with the audio is an activity that works on their listening skills, their ability to read the written text, and is an activity that allows them to hear the pronunciations of the written text modeled in an appropriate way. Often when students read they are excellent at decoding words, but often struggle with the proper pronunciation and comprehension. Allowing students to listen to stories (with or without the written text) can be a very valuable learning experience which can be tailored to various learning needs. I used them in a grade 2/3 classroom, and feel I could use them for older grades as well.

I have created a podcast demonstrating how simple it can be for educators to create podcasts of children’s literature for use in their classroom. I chose my favourite picture book “Oh, The Places You’ll Go by: Dr. Seuss“, a gift I received for my high school graduation. (It could be a gift for any level of graduation-even at the end of Kindergarten) I used the program Audacity to create my podcast, which is simple to use. In my classroom I would have have my audio storage site saved onto our class website for students to easily access, would burn them on a portable disk, or if our class had an MP3 player or IPod (each student having different headset). These are some devices I could have students use to listen to the stories. The audio storage site I used was podcastpeople.