Action Research Project- Audio Blogging Reviewing Current Practice: The Outram School Sports Blog is a place for students to complete sports game reviews, commentaries and results on all of the school’s sporting codes. The blog was started last year as a way to keep the local and wider community up to date with the latest news and achievements of students involved in sport at Outram School. Students review the game/sport they were involved in and type an entry into the blog. The blog entry is then checked by myself and published to appear on the blog. Most of the entries are made by senior school students (yr 6-8). I noticed that depending on the student’s literacy and typing skills the posting can become a time consuming process with the students skills limiting the quality and quantity of the blog entries. I also found that students found it hard to articulate in words the important aspects of the game and tended to use simple adjectives and nouns to describe the game experiences.
Investigation: I decided to find out if there is a better way for students with limited or developing literacy skills and junior school students (yr1-5) to submit interesting and entertaining blog entries. I started to investigate possible ways of getting students to post audio commentary onto the blog after noticing that students were a lot more animated when summarising their games verbally regardless of age and ability. The only problem was that all the blog sites I had visited had no type of audio post. Sites with some form of audio post were using it primarily as a way to introduce viewers to the blog by having automatic commentary set when the page is viewed. This would not work for the sport’s blog as viewers would get an automatic commentary regardless of what post they were interested in.
Imagining a way forward: During my facilitator visit session with Jane Nicholls we searched for various options available for audio posting. Jane was able to source information through her twitter networks and we were informed of an online audio storage site. The site allowed you to upload and share mp3 files (Boomp3). Once the mp3 files are uploaded the site then provides coding to upload mp3 files into blogs and wikis. This site ended up being the most user friendly of all the audio storage sites I visited.
Trying it out I decided to select three students who regularly post blog’s on the sport blog as my test students. Each student posted both a written and audio blog on a variety of sporting events they were involved in. The selected student’s each had experience with written posts. I decided to use Wordles to investigate the prominent word being used in both written and audio entries made by the students. Also I graphed the results according to the use of verbs, adjectives, nouns and word counts made in their posts.
Taking stock of what happened The following Wordles show the difference in word usage from the student’s posts on a recent basketball match they were involved in:
Written Blog Posts
QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
Audio Blog Posts
QuickTime™ and a decompressor are needed to see this picture.
The dominant words in the written post are: • Outam • Good • Player • Great • Awarded The dominant words in the audio post are: 1. Intercepts 2. Dribbling 3. Won 4. Shooting 5. Excellent The main difference between the student’s audio and written posts was the amount of verbs present in the audio posts. Students were more specific with the type of verb selected when audio posting. When comparing the student’s post on a basketball game the audio post had a lot more sport specific verbs i.e. dribbling, shooting, rebounding when compared with the same written post. All the student’s audio blogs had considerably more sport specific content when compared to their written blog entries. The graph below shows the difference in usage of verbs, adjectives and nouns between the blog entries: The next graph shows the difference between the word counts of the blog entries made by
25
Audio vs Blogging vsBlog Written Blogging Audio Written Entry Word Counts
400
20
350
300 15
Written Audio1 Student
250 10
200 Words 150 5
Student 2 Student 3
Average Number Used
100
0 50
0
Adjectives
Audio 1
Nouns Word Type
Written 1
Audio 2
Blog Entry
Verbs
Written 2
the student’s.
The graph shows the difference in word counts between the written and audio posts are quite significant. Students on average are using more words i.e. adjectives and verbs when describing their games. The Wordles have also shown that the audio blogs use primarily the same if not better quality words on average than the written blog entries.
Modification Students are now given the choice to audio blog or use text to blog. Generally most students prefer to audio blog. The main modification I have now made is that I ensure there are still written blogs on the site (generally from myself) to make the blog user friendly to our community users who don’t have broadband or access to quality listening devices on their personal computers. This ensures all blog visitors can experience both visual and audio features of the blog. The editing involved with written posts can be time consuming whereas if we are not happy with the audio post we can simply record over the post.
Reviewing and Evaluating The main differences I have noticed is now students are more willing to post entries on the blog as they now have the option to audio post. This has made the blog more user friendly to the younger students within the school who are posting commentaries on the blog. Students tend to visit the blog more often now to hear the commentaries about their games. The next step is to have a live commentary from the sidelines of the sporting event posted onto the blog. I am also interested in having visual images of games so parents/supporters who are not able to attend sporting events and games use the blog as a way of viewing live footage of Outram students competing.