Context

We have spent the last five years raising standards in writing at Ludworth and are always looking for new opportunities. Our previous school-based initiatives have been creative days, author visits, and Ros Wilson’s approach to writing. Two of us are Everybody Writes Enthusiasts and attended the annual free Enthusiast Workshop in February 2009 in Manchester where we got lots of helpful ideas about sharing children’s work using different technologies including radio, blogs and podcasting.

Aims & principles

• To promote the development of speaking and listening skills
• To establish a radio station containing contributions from every class, managed by Year 5

Summary

We began our project by researching the idea of podcasting, which we found was simple and low cost to run and produce.  We decided to work with http://www.radioanywhere.co.uk who are a company providing radio stations and websites to schools. They helped us set up the station as well as providing help and tutorials for recording with microphones, making mp3s and editing our sound files.

The Radio station was launched at our annual Writing Oscars event in July 2009.  The radio station is run by a team of Year 5 children and takes contributions from every class, including musical performances, poetry, interviews, plays, news, assemblies and match reports.  The children can listen to the station at lunchtime in school and the parents can access the podcasts at home.

At the Writing Oscars all of the children received a ‘Ludworth Star Writer’ pen as a celebration of their achievements and he radio “crew” all had special T shirts to wear. The Year 6s dressed up as celebrities to present the Oscars and all the children and staff came smartly dressed to the event. The Year 6s also wrote a script for the event, which was edited by a teacher. We invited our Governors, local press and advisors to share the day.

Our school podcast can be heard here and a photostory of the Writing Oscars event can be downloaded here.

Outcomes

• Extended home - school links
• Raised the profile of oracy and the value of talk
• The Oscars valued the progress made in writing and raised the children’s self-esteem
• We have an exciting radio station!
• We are now planning a whole school radio week next term, where we promote speaking and listening and raise the standard of contributions through a number of activities
• We intend to extend our use of outside broadcasts for the radio, including careers week, coverage of our theme days and school trips.

Attitudes and attainment after the project

‘The Oscars were amazing’ 
‘It is so cool having your own radio station.’ - Pupil comments

‘The radio station will provide us with lots of opportunities to enhance the children’s learning.’ - Staff feedback

Legacy

We have an exciting radio station!  The children are also talking about how they can contribute and when the next Oscars are.

We now need to develop the standard of the contributions to the radio and then perhaps move to running a television station.  We also hope to link up with a local radio station and have a week in school where we focus on the development of the radio station.

Currently the radio station is housed externally by Webanywhere; we are currently having a new website built which will enable us to host the radio station ourselves.  This will also allow us to have direct links to work or photographs which relate to the broadcast.

Resources

The Oscars are easy to introduce and automatically raise the profile of writing.  The costs associated with the Oscars are low – we chose to give all pupils a pen as a reward but other than this there wasn’t much cost involved aside from some stage decoration, as pupils provided their own costumes.

The use of the radio station is great for developing speaking and listening skills and can be delivered for a small outlay. Our expenses for the project were approximately £600 plus two days of teacher time.

Final thought

If we had to do anything differently, we would look into using different software if the finances permitted it.

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