A News Report from the English Speaking World

These podcasts are the products of a project made by class 8c at Vallhamra skola in the autumn of 2011. All stories are made up but based on real events. The pupils have  chosen an event in history, gathered information from different sources and studied it before making their own script. In deciding what event to cover the following links were useful: BBC History and  The Smithsonian To write the scripts they had seven questions  to be answered in their scripts: What date is it?, What time is it, Where are you?, Why are you there? What is happening? What do you see, smell, hear, feel? and Who is there? They have then, using  the program Audacity, recorded their own news report from their event. Some pupils have added soundeffects from soundbible.com and/or Multimediabyrån to make their reports more true to life. While working with the project the aims were to make them practise all the abilities in English described in the curriculum: • understand and interpret the content of spoken English and in different types of texts, • express themselves and communicate in speech and writing, • use language strategies to understand and make themselves understood, • adapt language for different purposes, recipients and contexts, and • reflect over living conditions, social and cultural phenomena in different contexts and parts of the world where English is used. Another intention of mine were that they, and I, should improve our ability to use computers as a tool for learning. As always you can not always predict what  you will learn at the beginning of a project, but at the end it pleased me  as a teacher the most to see my  pupils discovering that making your own decisions, being creative,  working together and sharing thoughts, ideas and products, makes learning more fun and more instructive.