Welcome to my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom. My name is Sam
Karyy and I'm a middle school teacher in San Francisco. I love trying out new and
innovative education technology in my class and then helping teachers figure
out how to work it into their curriculum. Right now, I'm really excited about
student podcasting using a program called Soundtrap. I recently started a
podcasting club at my school and I've also just been trying out podcasting in
all of my classes. Podcasting might sound like a huge undertaking that requires a
ton of equipment and setup, but with Soundtrap, all students need to get
started are computers and headsets. I don't know about you, but when I look at
my year long plan, the speaking and listening standards are definitely an
area of growth. Podcasting with students helps me fill that gap. Plus, it provides
them with the opportunity to discover new talents and interests they might
have never known they had. This is going to be a two-part tutorial. In the first
part, I'm going to show you some of the basic features of how to use Soundtrap.
You might even want to show this to your students because I'm going to show you
all the basic features of how it's used. In the second part, I'm going to show you
some resources that I've put together for a lesson plan to start podcasting
with my students and I'm also going to put the notes to those resources in the
video description below. The first thing that you're gonna want to do to start
podcasting with students is go to Soundtrap.com/edu. There, you'll
be able to sign up as a teacher and create a free 30 day account. If after 30
days you decide you really like it, then you can pay a monthly or annual
subscription. When you first log in, I would recommend that you check out the
resources tab. On that resources tab there are some different classroom ideas
as well as courses that you can take. I took the 'Certified Soundtrap Educator'
course and highly recommend it. The next important tab to go to is the 'Edu Admin'
tab. On this tab you'll be able to import users directly from your Google
Classroom. I'm going to go to import users. There I'll be able to select my
Google Classroom, I'll see all of the students that are enrolled in my Google
Classroom, when I hit import it will automatically sync their accounts to
Soundtrap. After you've created student accounts there are a few different
ways that you can get students into Soundtrap. One is by sharing the class
code with them. You can also post the link on to your Google Classroom. My preferred
way to get students into Soundtrap is by first creating an assignment and then
sharing that assignment with them on Google Classroom. This has the benefit of
directing them right into the music creation studio and it creates a nice
organization system where you can easily find all of the recordings that your
students did for a particular assignment. I'm gonna now show you how I would
create an assignment that I will then share to Google Classroom. While I'm
creating this assignment, I'm also going to show you the basic features of how to
use Soundtrap. The first thing that you're gonna want to do is enter the
studio. When you enter the studio, choose 'Podcast.' Give your podcast a name, so that
then when you share it with students, they'll know what they're working on.
When you're ready to record an audio track, you hit 'Add New Track,' click 'Voice
and Microphones,' and start recording. It's as simple as that. I like to make my own
recording explaining what the assignment is for students. They can go in and
delete that later or keep it, it's up to them. So let's play back my recording and
hear what it sounds like. "Hi everyone! For this assignment, you're
gonna be interviewing a family member and recording that interview in our first
class podcast." The next thing I'm going to show you is how to add a musical loop
to make your recording sound a little bit more authentically like a podcast
and this is something students have a lot of fun with. You're gonna click the
music icon. You'll see lots of different musical loops that you can add to your
podcast. If students want to preview the loop they can hit the 'Play' button and
when they're ready to actually put it into their recording, they can either
drag it in or double click. Now I'm going to show you some of the basic editing
functions in Soundtrap that will help students optimize their recording. First,
I'm going to want to actually start my podcast with my music, so I'm gonna drag
the voice recording a little bit forward. Then I'm gonna shorten my sound loop so
that it's only playing for a short time in the beginning. I can do this simply by
clicking and dragging on the sound recording. The next thing that I'm going
to show you is how to split a region, which allows you to very easily just
delete sections from your recording. If you wanted to split a region in two,
simply click where you want to edit the region, go to
'Edit,' click 'Split Region,' and then if you want to delete that section, you can
easily delete it. Now another useful function for podcasting is to fade out a
musical track. So what I'm going to do is drag the edge of the music track over
the section that I want to fade out. Now what I'm able to do is drag my recorded
track right over that faded section. So now we're gonna hear the music, it will
fade out as my voice track is coming in. Let's hear what that sounds like.
Pretty awesome! One of the coolest features of Soundtrap is
the ability to transcribe the audio track and then use that transcription to
actually go back and edit the audio. The way that you're gonna do that is by
clicking 'Transcribe Voice Track,' then you'll see that there's a text version
of what you recorded. Now here there are a couple different things you can do. If
you notice that the text is incorrect, you can correct it by highlighting a
word and clicking 'Text Correction.' The most important feature is the ability to
use the transcription to actually directly edit your audio. What you're
gonna do is highlight a section that you actually want to get rid of. So let's say
that you recorded a bunch of 'Ummms' and you just want to cut that out or there's
just sections of your audio recording that you don't want as part of your
final draft. What you're gonna do is highlight that section, double click,
click 'Cut Audio,' and you'll see that up top it's actually shortened my audio
recording. So let's play it back to hear what it now sounds like. Pretty amazing!
It makes editing podcasts really easy for students to do. Another great feature
of Soundtrap is the ability to add a collaborator to their podcast. They can
add somebody to their podcast by clicking the 'Collaborator' button, hit
plus. From there they'll be able to see all the other students that are already
invited through Google Classroom. They click the 'Invite' button, invite that
student, and that student will be sent an email asking if they want to participate
in their podcast. After the student has accepted the invitation, you'll see their
icon pop up and then that student can also add
recordings in the same studio. Now, if the students are outside of class, they can
get on a video call together. What's great about this software is that it's
essentially like Google Docs but for audio, so students can collaborate from
any location and it will always be saved on the cloud. Now the next thing you're
going to do is save your podcast, click 'Exit Studio,' and here you'll see that
there's an option to actually create an assignment. I can click that button or
the drop down menu to create an assignment for students. I'm going to
click 'Create an Assignment,' 'Share Assignment,' 'Google Classroom,' pick which
Google Classroom you want to share that assignment to. I'll create an assignment,
title my assignment, give it a due date, organize it in a topic, then click 'Assign.'
Now you can view the assignment directly on Google Classroom the way that a
student would see it. I absolutely love it when EdTech software easily integrates
with Google Classroom because it makes it so easy for me to push out different
assignments to students. Now when students click on this link, they're
gonna go directly into the studio and they'll be able to hear the recording
that you made. This will also push out a separate recording for every single
student, so they'll be able to be in their own individual studio. After
students have recorded their podcast, you can check out their work by scrolling to
the bottom, finding the assignments you created,
clicking the drop down menu, and it will show all the different podcasts that
your students have recorded. Now from here, you can choose to do different
things. You could download that file as an mp3 and then play it through your
iTunes. You could also direct students to download it as an mp3 and then upload
that file to Google Classroom as an assignment, so that other students in the
class can listen to it and that's actually something that I like to do
myself. The next thing I'm going to show you are some resources that I put
together to roll out podcasting with my class. The goal of this assignment was to
get students to record a podcast about their family history and and it involved
them interviewing a family member. The first thing that we did was activate
their prior knowledge. So I had students think about what they already knew about a
podcast. Then, I had them log in to NPR and check out some examples of some podcasts,
so that they could get an idea of what a podcast is all about. From there, they
clicked on another link that took them to the question on Google, "What is a
podcast?" so that they could do a little bit of research, poke around, see what the
internet says a podcast is. For the next part, what we did is watch some
StoryCorps videos together as a class, students could also watch some
independently. They discussed why the StoryCorps videos were good, what were
some common elements among them, what they noticed about how the interviewers
got their participants to talk about interesting things in those interviews.
Then they read a short article, also on NPR, about what makes a good interview
and from there they started to plan their interview. So they thought about
who they would like to interview, what they already knew about that person, why
they wanted to interview them, and then they thought a little bit about if there
was any kind of music that might relate to that person, so that they might
integrate that into their podcast. Next they plan some interview questions. I
directed them to this link, where they could find some different ideas for
questions that they could ask their relatives to get them to tell an
interesting story. Step four was to have students go out and interview their
family member and then get the answers to the questions they had prepared and
record them. Step five was to have students plan their recording and then
actually record in Soundtrap. So first I had students think about a key idea or
theme that they were hoping to communicate like love, or perseverance, or
the importance of family. I had them really solidify whether or not they were
gonna put some specific type of music or sound in their recording to illustrate
something about their family. Then I had them copy and paste, edit, and revise
their final draft, so that they were ready to log in to Soundtrap and record
it. Again, I like to post that on Google Classroom to make it really easy for
kids to do. After students recorded, I had them upload their mp3 file to Google
Classroom and then listen to at least five of their classmates' work. From there,
I had them leave different comments on their peers'
work. Comments that could be either a comment about something that they liked
or found interesting, such as, "I really appreciated how you did this thing."
Another option was to ask a clarifying question or make a connection, for
example, "Could you tell me more about," "I want to follow up on your idea about and
add something." After we finished the entire project, I had students reflect. They
thought about what went well for you with this project, what is something you
could do to improve upon next time we do a project like this, and whether or not
there's something your teacher could help you with next time. I always like
ending a project with the reflection so that they can think about what went well
and what is something that they could do to improve. If you're interested in more
lesson plan ideas for how to podcast with students, I recommend going to the
'Lesson Plans' tab and then checking out some of the different lessons that are
available for you. I hope you learned how easy it is to get started podcasting
with students. I highly recommend it and your students are going to absolutely
love it. If you have any questions about how I've been using podcasting in my
classes, please ask in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching my video.
If you'd like to see more of my education technology tutorials, hit that
red subscribe button. Below, you can also find a link to my website, as well as my
Twitter handle, and my podcast, where I have conversations with other educators
about how they use technology in class and industry professionals about the
latest and greatest in education technology. Thanks again and have a great week!