Creating Podcasts With a Twinned School in English lessons:A Teaching Unit

Lesson Plan from the year 2009 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,7, University of Marburg (Fachbereich für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: New Media in Foreign Language Education, language: English, abstract: This teaching unit has been designed for eighth graders at the gymnasium who learn English as a first foreign language. The unit contains six lessons of 45 minutes each. The general aim is to learn what podcasting is about, how to listen and subscribe to specific podcasts, and the most important point: How to create ones own podcasts and how to share them with students from a twinned school. After the six lessons the teaching unit wont be finished. What follows is a steady setting-up of a correspondence between two twinned schools that is to say the German school, and a school from the USA. In this term paper we will discuss what podcasting is in general and which learning possibilities we will have for the students when working with podcasts in the 8th class of a Hessian Gymnasium. In the next chapter we will contrast the New Media with traditional teaching methods and point out some advantages concerning the teaching project. Afterwards the requirements for the students and the learning objectives will shortly be illustrated. In chapter six we will investigate the curricular connections of the given teaching unit and finally chapter seven gives a detailed description of the teaching unit. In the appendix one will find the six session plans.