
We had a blast this week making readers theater
podcasts of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas using Garage Band. I know it’s too late for most of you to do a
Christmas podcast, but I thought I’d share the steps we took in case you’d like
to try it using any type of reader’s theater or poem.
Once you open up Garage Band, make sure you’re on
the New Project tab and select Podcast. Save it as whatever you’d like to
call it and press Create.
It’s best to record the audio portion first. Click on either Male or Female Basic at the
top left. (It really doesn’t matter which one you choose.) To record, press the red record button at the
very bottom. Hit the space bar or stop button to stop your recording.
To play your recording back, drag the arrow (with
the red line attached) to the beginning and press play or hit the space
bar. The space bar is also used to pause and stop. Since my kids were taking turns reading their parts,
I had them stop between each stanza of the poem. If they made a mistake, they could easily
delete their section without messing with the entire recording.
Once my students were satisfied with the audio,
they took pictures of the illustrations they made to go with each scene using
Photobooth. (This could also obviously
be done with a camera if you prefer.)
They then dragged each individual picture into
Garage Band above the corresponding audio clip.
In the picture below, you can see that the purple bubbles (audio) are lined
up with the gray bubbles (pictures).
The last step is to export it as an AAC encoder as shown below. I uploaded all the
podcasts to my classroom website so the families could enjoy them over
break. We also presented them to our first grade reading buddies today and they loved it!:) Click HERE to view one of my
groups’ podcast.