I never thought I’d say this, but I made a radio show clip!  It was so much fun.  This was an assignment for DS106 and not gonna lie I was really dreading it.  I knew NOTHING about garageband and I was not looking forward to learning it.  However, once my group, “Three Chicks and a Dude”, and I got together sat down, wrote up a basic script, said our ideas, etc, the ball got rolling and we had a blast.

Right from the start, we established that we wanted our radio show to feel like you (the listeners) were sitting down with us talking in our living room.  We wanted the conversation to flow nicely and we also wanted to show that we all had good chemistry.  We also wanted to do something different.  No offense to my classmates, but I feel like a lot of people had similar ideas: talk about gossip, traffic, news, book talks, etc.  We wanted something edgy, something a little out of the box.  So we decided to talk about college.  We had people record their favorite college memory by saying, “I will always remember….(insert your memory here)…) and we just uploaded it into our podcast.  This turned out so much better than we thought.  Our friends and family helped a lot (thanks!) and I think it brought an authentic feel to our radio show because it showed that our “listeners” were active and important to us.  We also had a discussion about our favorite memories afterwards, which luckily did not sound scripted because it wasn’t.  We didn’t want to follow the script too much because we wanted this to sound natural- the script was more of an outline or guideline.

After that commercial break, we lead the conversation into talking about this new movie coming out, “Project X” which is about a crazy party in college.  We thought that linked to our first segment considering people were telling us about their college memories.  That was a brief conversation, but we moved onto “Post Secret”.  I love “Post Secret” which is an anonymous foundation where people mail their deepest secrets to tis man to get it off their chests.  This foundation donates money and raises awareness for suicide prevention.  Sometimes these postcards could be really funny, but sometimes they are heartbreakingly sad.  For this segment, we pretended that our listeners mailed us in their own post secrets and we all read a few from the website.  We went to another commercial break and when we came back we did our post secrets.  However, we put them in a bowl and put 5 (since there was 4 of us) to throw our listeners off and we each read one.  We told our listeners to email us their guesses on whose secrets are whose and the winners will go into a drawing for a Dave Matthews Concert.

I thought this was a lot of fun and definitely relates to ELA in the classroom.  A radio show is like a spoken version of an essay.  You need a topic/thesis and each segment is related to this overall topic or theme.  Our theme, I guess you can say, is college memories and secrets.  We also had to write a script which helps with grammar, organization of ideas, coherent thoughts, fluidity, etc.  I think this presents “essay writing” in a new, fun way to students to help them get warmed up to it.

I really enjoyed this, and I will upload my link to the radio show soon!  I hope you all enjoy it as much as we do