My friend Wil helped me find ipadio, a wonderful, free phonecasting service that I plan on using next year with my students. (Thanks, Wil!)

Phonecasting is a fancy word for podcasting. The only difference is that you use your phone and call up a number to record your voice, instead of using a microphone and computer.

The advantage of phonecasting for teachers and students is that it is way easier than podcasting. Students can record their voice anywhere — from their home, in a car, and even from your classroom.

This year, I had students record phonecasts and post them to iseroma.com, my class blog (check it out!), using Google Voice. It worked well, except I had to manually post each of my student’s podcasts to my website. This took forever.

ipadio does the same thing but also posts your phonecast automatically online. That means I can have my students call in, record their phonecast, and within seconds, their thoughts are published on iseroma.com.

Next year, I’ll use ipadio to make reading more public. Reading is too private, too internal. Socratic seminars are a good way to assess how students are reading, but they don’t hone in on the reading process itself.

I’ll have students do think-alouds while reading a new text live. With ipadio, they’ll record the cognitive reading strategies they employ. As a class, we’ll be able to compare and contrast what different readers  do when they get stuck. We’ll also be able to see how various readers bring different prior knowledge to a new text and what connections we make.

Even more compelling, students will be able to track their growth as readers because all of their ipadio phonecasts will be saved automatically. 

How often and for how long do you truly listen to your students?

I don’t mean listening to an answer they give or a comment they make in class. I mean listening more deeply about who they are: their interests, their goals, their problems, their needs as a student.

With more than a hundred students and daily public school chaos, it’s nearly impossible to find the time and peace to sit down and listen to a student without an immediate interruption.

Before this year, I “listened” to my students mostly through letters. When I had the time and energy, I even wrote personal letters back to each of my students, a herculean task. Although this was effective, it was impossible to do more than once a quarter.

That’s why this year I’m trying something new: The Weekly Voicemail Assignment.

On Thursday nights, students call me on my Google Voice number (set to Do Not Disturb!”) and answer some prompts. On my own time, I listen to each message and quickly respond with a quick personal text.

Even though each voicemail averages only one minute (much faster than reading and responding), I’m finding that the weekly assignment is helping me build positive relationships with my students. They know that I’m listening. They get to talk to me without worrying about what others might say. It’s like we’re having a private meeting — except we’re not in the same room.

I’m looking forward to tracking these voicemails (they’re all archived!) and looking at them more closely over the year.