Unit 5 Reflection

 Unit 5 was all about podcasting and blogging. I’m a frequent consumer of podcasts and, personally, they have revolutionized the way that I read. I was an avid reader in my childhood, but as I grew up, I started to have major problems with focusing on any book you put in front of me. I listened to my first podcast when I was a senior in high school after picking up the book 1984 by George Orwell. At first, I immensely struggled to retain any of what I read and felt like I was just looking at words rather than taking them in, so I started listening to an audiobook. It completely transformed the way I experienced the story. There was mood music and sound effects, and the tone of the narrator’s voice varied depending on the emotion displayed in the scene. I was hooked. I remember sitting at my desk in study hall and my jaw dropping as I listened to the part where (SPOILER ALERT) Winston and Julia were arrested in the bedroom that they rented. Beforehand, there were background noises of birds chirping and the woman outside singing. It was serene. I felt so happy for them having finally achieved peace. Then, the narrator’s tone shifted, and the sound effects turned ominous. I remember my heart dropping to my stomach when that switch happened. I knew immediately that it was over for them. I was reminded of this by the reading, “Voices and Sounds heard: Composing through Narrative Podcasting,” where students produced their own podcasts and used sound effects as a second mode of expression to their spoken words. When I listened to 1984, the sounds did a vast majority of the expression. With using an audio format, the tone of the narrator’s voice and the added sounds express far more than what written words can. In the assignment in the text, the students were required to use sound effects in their podcast and I 100% agree with that being an important criterion to meet. The added sounds completely elevate the experience. It is like seeing VS. reading a play. One is much more immersive than the other. While the words in my audiobook gave the details, the sound effects made me feel like I was there. This worked well for me and the article, “Back to ‘I’: Recasting students and Teachers as Problem-Explorers through Podcasting,” helped me to realize that this might just be what works for others on the other side of the coin, as well. I was skeptical at first of having students just talk in place of a paper, but after reading this I realized that’s not what’s happening at all. While writing is a necessary skill, podcasting is a completely different animal. It is a new medium that might just be the thing students need to finally have something that works for them in terms of expressing their ideas. Also, podcasting includes writing. It is not doing away with it entirely. It requires a plan of how you are going to structure your speech. It requires specific word choices that convey what you are intending to express. Podcasting is not a panacea for writing. It simply changes the mode being used to express thoughts and ideas. Though this unit was a short one, I think it might have been my favorite and I hope to use podcasting in my future classroom someday. I love listening to podcasts while I am busy doing other things. I even listened to one as I got started writing this blog post. I thought for my hyperlink I would share one of my favorite podcasts. One in particular that fits this post’s theme of the power that sound holds in expression is The Broski Report hosted by Brittany Broski. It is themed around the idea that the fans of the show make up Broski Nation and our venerated leader herself is relaying the goings on of her life. My favorite episode, and the one that most expresses my overall message, is titled “Why I Left the Christian Church.” Here, Brittany reviews the album “Preacher’s Daughter” by Ethel Cain and relates it to her own experiences growing up in Texas. The episode starts off with her discussing the new fictional man she is thirsting after and making feral monkey noises to express how she feels about him. Later on, however, she cries as she is moved by the music on the album. She openly weeps for the things that she has lost both by being born into the Christian church and by leaving it. This shows both how the sounds of the music stirred such an intense reaction and how her cries make her emotion more palpable than if her message was written. If she only expressed her feelings through words, the reader may interpret her feelings as angry or dismissive of the church’s ideals, but by hearing her cry through her speech the listeners can determine that she feels a sense of immense mourning for the life she could've had if she was not raised religiously and for the life she left behind when leaving the church.