Welcome to Making Audio to Inspire Learning! As the ever-growing catalog of podcasts shows, audio storytelling is a powerful way to share information, unpack an issue or keep listeners glued to their seats with riveting plot twists. As an educator, podcast projects are an engaging way to help students share their voices (literally!) with the wider world. But integrating audio projects does even more. It’s true! When students produce podcasts, they write and revise scripts, build oral language and presentation skills, collaborate with others and, yes, practice listening as well as speaking. With audio storytelling, traditional literacy meets media literacy in a way that’s music to any educators’ ears. (See what we did there?) 

Why take this course? 

• You want to learn more about how to build traditional and media literacy skills through audio storytelling in your classroom or learning environment
• You want to strengthen your own audio production skills 
• You want to explore the various tools available to make podcasting work for you and your students 

More About This Course

This course has several discussions and two assignments. In one of the assignments, you’ll come up with a specific audio project that would work in your learning environment and share an assignment outline or plan. The course materials will guide you through this process, but we can only take you so far. You know your content better than we do. For the second assignment, you will make a model of the audio project you want your students to do. We are all about learn-by-doing here on KQED Teach. By going through the audio production process yourself, you’ll learn so much about the pleasures and pitfalls of audio production. When the time comes to teach your students, you’ll be able to guide them much more effectively and productively. 

We don’t believe in busy work and “seat time.” We want you to take this course and also work on curriculum development and lesson planning at the same time!

The course instructors will provide you feedback on your assignments designed to help you improve your practice.  Your instructors' recommendations will align with the “Creation” KQED media literacy competency.  Here’s how we describe this competency:

Exemplary media literacy educators demonstrate the following competency with regards to creating media:

1. Ability to create original digital media (i.e. audio, video, graphics) to communicate information to an intended audience, using a variety of media production techniques and tools.
   1. Demonstrate understanding of copyright, fair use, and intellectual property with respect to the media you and your students create, including rules regarding ownership of content created with GenAI tools.  
   2. Critically evaluate the way you chose to represent individuals, groups and topics in your media, including media created in partnership with GenAI, to ensure fair and accurate portrayals of people, places, and events. 
   3. Effectively employ narrative, audio and visual design principles to deliver a clear message.
   4. Use feedback and reflection to improve media creation and production.

In addition, other educators may view and comment on your submission, which many course participants have found helpful. We encourage you to do the same.

You can go through the course at whatever pace makes sense for you, and review anything afterwards that you might have missed. In order to receive a certificate of completion, you will need to complete all the assignments and finish the course within four weeks of starting it. If you don’t finish in time, no worries, you can always re-enroll.