Podcasts are both an ideal and difficult text type to teach for a non-fiction creative writing unit in a junior English classroom. Perfect, because the medium offers so many opportunities to create texts in different ways. But difficult, also, because podcasts can be long and there is so much diversity in genre and structure of podcasts that they can actually be a challenging text type for students to produce. For example, while true crime podcasts such as ‘Serial’ can be engaging to study and teach as an analytic text, getting students to produce their own true crime podcast requires a lot of scaffolding. One simple option for podcast creation is the interview podcast. If students interview each other in the classroom, it requires no research. Rather, you can focus on the skills of generating interesting questions and maintaining interesting conversation – English skills you can practise straightaway. You can download a simple lesson plan for using a mentor text to help students create their own interview podcasts here.
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