topic2 - podcasts

In my 11 year stint as an English teacher, before I started teaching computers this fall, my students often thought I was ready to fall off my rocker because of the ideas I would come up with to attempt to actually make teaching more fun.

I was charged each fall to help prep my 12th grade students for the dreaded SAT. I used the thick, cumbersome, and dreadful Princeton Review text, and the kids thought of it much like I did...a chore. A few years back, a good friend and French teacher told me she was doing French podcasts and posting them on her blog. She showed me where she was getting them from - quite simply iTunes in the Podcast section - and I looked around with her on that site. We stumbled across one, The Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute, and as quirky as it is, I loved it! It's basically a barber-shop quartet-like group who takes SAT words and puts them in context into a goofy song with some sort of theme. There is even a more recent one about Hollywood girls getting into trouble and going to jail - Lindsey, Nicole, and Paris (words are incarceration, exile, inebriated, discernment, and a few others).

The next day, I shared one of the podcasts with my senior class. Many of them gave them the raised eyebrow, scorning my choice as yet another stupid trick to actually get them engaged. But, as they listened, they started laughing, asking what this word and that word meant. I suggested we take 2 podcasts a week, and make those words the ones we would study to help prepare for the SAT. They agreed. They found the access easy, and many didn't need to use the dictionary to define the words. Their scores were higher on the quizzes. Imagine...they enjoyed learning SAT vocabulary.