Podcasts are the best!

I’m pretty sure that every second language learner has heard of podcasts. They are digital media files that can be on any topic and can include music and video. They can be authentic or specially made for language learners (Dudeney & Hockly, 2007). What I love about podcasts is they are simple to use. You can easily download on your mobile phone and listen to them anywhere, anytime. This week, I dawned that they are easy to create as well. Thus I would definitely recommend creating and listening to podcasts to my students. 

Our task was to create a podcast and we had three options:

Option 1 was about creating a chant of 1 minute.  We would choose a character from a fable, story or a fairytale, create an 8-10-line song and sing it to a podcast.

Option 2 was about coming up with a radical, inspiring, controversial idea to make the world a better world to live in and explaining it in exactly 60 seconds which I think is quite difficult to make. You know, not 59 seconds nor 61.

Option 3 was about narrating a sound rich story of 2 minutes starting with “I will tell you the strangest story ever. It all started when I was walking through the park to go to school…”

That was what I chose! I wrote a short story about a kid trying to go to school on a rainy day and added exactly 11 different sound effects. If you ask me whether I had any difficulties or not, I would say that it was easier than I could ever imagine. The only problem that I encountered was about sound effects. Finding the correct sound effect was a little bit tiring. As an example, I couldn't find anyone singing a lullaby with a naked voice! So I recorded my own voice -sorry for that horrible voice btw-. 

There are a lot of free websites allowing us to create podcasts freely. I used Vocaroo. Here is my podcast.

Here is my story. (I underlined the words of which I added sound effects.)

 

I will tell you the strangest story ever. It all started when I was walking through the park to go to school. It was a stormy day. Just like in horror movies, there was no sunlight nor anyone even though it was midday. The wind was blowing madly. I could barely control my umbrella and after some crazy wind, it broke free. I was soaking wet, shivering from cold and on top of these, a mad dog started chasing after me. I threw my backpack towards it and started running at the highest speed. I saw a building, the door of which was open. I immediately took shelter in it. To make sure that I get rid of the mad and stupid dog, I tried to close the apartment door slightly. But I was not expecting the door to be this much heavy. It slipped off my hands and closed down. As soon as it is closed, a baby started crying. It was a deep non-stop crying. I was petrified in the middle of the gloomy apartment hallway all alone. Then, the sound of steps added to the baby’s crying. And someone began to sing a lullaby. The door at the end of the hallway was opened and a woman came out with a crying baby on her lap.

She said ‘I’m sorry, my baby is so scared and she can’t help herself crying.’ I was too terrified to go to school. So, I came back home. 

I should probably stop watching horror movies.