My Live School

Photo by Ilmicrofono Oggiono on Flickr

It was heart-warming to see so many passionate educators at the recent BETT Show in London. Thousands of teachers from all sectors descended on the Excel Centre last week to view the latest in learning technology, hear from key speakers in the field of education, and of course, to connect and reconnect with others of like mind. It is arguably the latter that draws the majority of teachers to BETT year after year. The BETT TeachMeet, organised by Drew Buddie, Dawn Hallybone and Ian Usher and their colleagues was a great success, as was the aftermath in which many of us made our way over to one of the Excel watering holes to continue networking long into the night.

It was there in the post-Teachmeet social that I met Louise Stone, an Infant School ICT Co-ordinator who invests time promoting a wonderful organisation called My Live School. The website is worth checking out, because it offers schools a chance to start their own school radio, and even gives away free starter kits! In conversation with her over a few drinks, I discovered how passionate she is about getting children to conceive, produce and present live radio. The benefits are numerous, but let me just list a few here:

1) Children need to do research to find out more about what they will be presenting.
2) They need to be aware of their audience, which encourages more awareness and skill development in speaking, listening, and reading.
3) There is an immediacy to School Radio that gives authenticity to the learning - and feedback can also be fairly immediate too, with the use of other technology.
4) School Radio generates a lot of excitement about learning of specific subjects, many of which link directly to the curriculum.
5) Children learn to work in teams and to collaborate with each other.
6) Children learn to communicate in new ways, and develop wider skills for the 21st Century, especially around digital literacies and fluencies.
7) School Radio can boost confidence.
8) The creative elements of script writing, interviewing and sound recording/broadcast can be directly transferrable into other learning activities.

Now, I have written glowingly about school radio on several previous occasions, notably in the Hidden Audience Effect (which is a key affordance of school radio that encourages children to raise their game) and in Radio Waves. Several schools are now engaged in creating resources and infrastructure that can facilitate school radio. It doesn't take much to set up a small studio and a system to broadcast sound across a school campus. There are several available guides online, but perhaps one of the most useful and accessible is this one called Let's Listen.


My Live School by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.