All we need is Radio Saltash!

Yes it is true, our school has a radio station. I know that lots of schools have them but they range from online ones run over the internet to pupils broadcasting over the schools basic PA system. The one we have is the latest hi-tech one available for schools and does cost a lot of money. We purchased ours this year as part of the money we received during our re-designation as a specialist school in Science, Maths and Computing with a rural dimension. As of yet we still haven’t fully utilized it within the school however I want to tell you about how I have been using it in lessons recently with my students. You can see some more background information on where you can buy them here: http://schoolradio.clydebroadcast.co.uk/ I should say that there may be other companies that sell these so please don’t think I am advertising for synergy I am just telling you where we got ours from.

The radio kit is fantastic and is really amazing in quality and I guess that is why it is the price it is, in fact we have bought a mobile version so it can be used in classrooms but it is exactly what they use in actual radio station which is brilliant. I really wanted to give it a go and was a little apprehensive as I had not received any training on how to use it but one of my students in Year 8 had and knew a lot about so I basically encouraged him to lead the lessons which he did. He was absolutely amazing, I won’t name him but for a 12 year old boy who is not very confident it was a fantastic learning experience for him and now I have definitely seen a change in his confidence after it.

So basically we planned a 2 hour lesson where students would use the first hour to write a short script for their radio broadcast in pairs. The topic of the radio broadcast was based on the subject we were currently studying, with the aim of all students recording their small radio broadcasts and we would then record the actual show of around 15 minutes in total including jingles and one song as a revision radio broadcast for them to download and listen to. I have an example that you can listen to by clicking on the link below. This example is from a Year 8 lower ability class who were working on digestion. I have edited it from a 18 minute radio broadcast to just over 5 minutes but shows some examples of what the broadcast was like.

The learning that took place was awesome and the final product I think for the first time that the group had done it and to do it in such a short timescale, for their ability was brilliant. The students were extremely engaged and they learnt lots from the activity and as a result now have created their own resource which can be used for revision. I then replicated these lessons for all my other classes and the feedback received from students was extremely positive not only did they learn more about the subject they were studying but they also developed many new skills such as understanding how the actual technology of the radio worked to the conditions and experience of carrying out a live radio broadcast. Do you have a school radio station? What sort of things do you do with a radio broadcast within your lessons?

Here is the link to the example lesson radio broadcast: http://drop.io/radiosaltash