NPR's The World

My audio lesson consisted of students listening to radio segments from the NPR broadcast The World.

In geography, we are currently studying Latin America.  For this lesson the focus was on the cultural and economic geography of the region.  I selected 6 different countries that were featured (relatively recently) on the show.  I downloaded the stories from the website and placed them into a forum on the Moodle.  The students were each assigned one country and could choose two others that they found interesting.

In the Moodle, each student had to write a one paragraph summary on each of their countries (for a total of 3 paragraphs), and then comment on their peers' summaries.  This gave the students an understanding of the different issues each country faces and allows them to synthesize an opinion about the current situation in that region of the world.

Overall, the lesson was a success.  The students were engaged and produced decent analysis of the stories.  I feel that each student gained a basis of knowledge on what life is like in each of the countries.  However, it was easy for some students to get off track and post comments that were not "scholarly".  I felt that I was fairly vigilant during the assignment; I did not catch anyone watching you tube videos.  But, I could not really monitor what the students were writing in their comments until it was posted to the forum.  After that I could delete it, but I would have to keep constantly updating the page to see the new comments.

Some snags:

• Not all of my students had headphones, so I had to borrow some from the library
• Some students preferred to read the content while listening, and searched for the transcripts online
• My foreign exchange student struggled with the audio and I told her to use the transcripts as well
• There will be some goofballs that don't take the assignment seriously and put inappropriate comments on the forum