Hey teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I am your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.

Well, hey there. Welcome back to another episode of the Classroom Commute.  I'm your host, Rachael Parlett. And if you don't know me, I am the curriculum writer for The Classroom Nook over at classroomnook.com, where we talked about all things teacher related. And this podcast gives me the opportunity to ride in with you to school and hopefully inspire you for a fun day with your students. Of course, it's totally cool if you're listening to me at the gym, or at home, or wherever you might be today. Thanks again for allowing me to hang out with you for a little bit.

Today I want to talk about audio books because I think audio books are a great tool to use in your classroom because they allow you to offer differentiated instruction. They give a little variety to the regular types of activities that students might do, and they're just fun for students. So I want to share with you my favorite ways to use audiobooks in your classroom.

But first I want to share with you some of the benefits of using audio books. I think that mixing in audio books into your regular reading instruction can really have a big impact on your students. I think the most obvious benefit is that audio books offer a great model for fluency and expression. Students will hear the way that the text should be read. They can learn from it and hopefully apply it to their own reading. Audiobooks also allow students to just focus on the content and not the actual act of reading. Students are expected to learn and understand their grade levels content, but they still sometimes struggle to actually read the text.  So their focus becomes reading the text and not understanding the content. And just because they struggle to read does not mean that they can't understand the content that's being presented. So being able to listen to it helps to break down any reading barriers that might get in the way of a student's comprehension of the subject matter.

Audiobooks also provide additional ways to expose students to the same information. We never want to present our students with information just once, because a student may not learn in that particular manner that you're presenting it.  Audio books are just one more way to present new information to students, and each time we present it to them, they might learn something new, or realize something, or figure something out that they didn't in the first, second, or even third time that they heard that information. Audiobooks develop listening skills. We know how important this is, right? But we have to give them lots of opportunity to develop this skill because it doesn't come naturally to all students, however.  It is a skill that they need to develop along the way. You can help support them by giving students a graphic organizer or something to fill out while they're listening, and that will help them to stay focused.

All right, so those are some of the benefits, but now let's talk about some of the ways that you can use audio books in your classroom.

The most obvious way, I'm sure you're already thinking it, is a listening center in small groups or even as individuals. Students can follow along to a book and then they can complete comprehension activities after completing that book. This works great if you use the workshop model, because students can rotate through that center and listen to whatever book that you've assigned for them.  You don't have to have them all listen to the same book. You can have different books for different groups. You can also use audiobooks in small group novels. If you have students meeting on a regular basis to read the same novel, you could have them listen to that novel together. And as a group, students can complete projects and activities in response to that novel that they're listening to. If you create your own audio books, and we'll talk more about that in a minute, you can even record yourself asking discussion questions within the audio track and prompting students to pause the audio book to stop and talk about what they're reading. It's a way for you to kind of scaffold a literature circle or a book club.

I've already mentioned this a little bit in the benefits, but you can use audiobooks to help students work on their fluency. To do this, you're gonna need to provide students with a copy of the text and as they listen to it, they're going to read along out loud with it. Encourage the student to mimic the reading style on the audio clip with their own voice. You can do this with short texts, like poems, and then they can read it several times in a row and really develop their fluency on that particular text.

Another way to use audiobooks in the classroom is to have students create a visual representation of what they're listening to. Have students illustrate the scene of the story or illustrate important concepts that they're learning. Students can create word clouds to represent key ideas and characters and events, all from the text and with audio books. It's easy for students to pause the audio and complete portions of their visual representation so that they don't focus so much on what they're what they're creating and then not listen to what's coming next in the audio. This strategy gives students the opportunity to internalize what they're learning and represent it in a way that makes sense to them.

This next strategy is probably going to be the most fun for your students, but it might require the most prep for you -- but it's totally worth it. Students can create their own audio books. You can provide students with a recording device (there are plenty of apps for that) and allow students to record themselves reading a short book, a poem, or even part of their favorite book. If you're working on a book together as a class, like a chapter book, you can assign different students, different chapters or different pages within that, and then connect all the audio clips together and create one reading of the book. And how fun would that be for students to listen back and hear all of their classmates reading the same book? You could have a class celebration at the end to celebrate listening to the completed project. Unlike most adults, students actually love to hear their voices on audio clips, and I promise I will give you some tools, and resources that you can use to create your own audiobooks. We'll get to that in just a minute.

Another way to use audiobooks is to send them home with students. If your school is able, load up an iPad, tablet or another device with some audio books and send them home with students. Many classrooms are 1:1, and some districts even allow students to take devices home. So if you have that opportunity, load up those devices with some audio books and send them home with your students.

All right, I've got a few more ideas here for you. You can use audio books in your classroom to differentiate your instruction. While some students may read the printed version of the text, struggling readers can listen to the audio version. And I, as I said before, this is especially helpful in the content areas where you really just want them to understand the information and not so much focus on actually reading it. A student's listening comprehension is typically beyond what they can understand reading it in print. Of course, have them follow along so that they can see the words and hear them. Audiobooks will keep struggling readers from following behind in the content areas.

Alright, I’ve got two more here for you. You can use audiobooks in your classroom as an incentive. Instead of offering a prize or a sticker, or whatever you use in your rewards system in your classroom, you can reward your students for reaching a reading goal or milestone and allow them to spend some time in the classroom, during lunch or on a Friday afternoon, listening to an audiobook. Together, they can get comfy sitting in beanbag chairs, carpet squares, or any other fun places that you might have in your room. You can even give them snacks and have them hang out and listen to the book as the reward. I love this idea because it teaches students that reading is a reward.

All right, The last idea that I have to share with you about how to use audio books in your classroom is to start a new book by listening to the first few pages or a first chapter of the book that you're reading. You can do this for a read aloud that you do with your whole class or even in a guided reading small group. You can have them listen to the first few pages, or even the first chapter. Many times audiobooks will have background sound effects, and that helps to make the story come alive and kind of set the scene for your students. Doing this is going to get your students hooked on the book. Do it as a little teaser to kind of get your students excited and then have them go back into small groups or even independently, and begin reading the book on their own. I love this idea of using it as the introduction to a new book.

Alright, I promised I would tell you about some resources that you can use if you want to create your own audio books. This is gonna be the best way for you to actually customize exactly the kinds of books that you want your students to be listening to or the types of poems and reading passages you want. If you don't have access to a subscription service at your school, they really are easy to make on your own, and it requires very little equipment. The only major thing that you need is obviously the book, but then a microphone, and a lot of your devices already have microphones built in them. But if you want something with a little bit better quality, you can get very nice microphone for very inexpensive, $20 or less. And I will link to some of the options that I've used in the past in our show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/6 Once you have your microphone, the only other thing that you need is something to record it on. There are a lot of free apps on your iPhone or your smartphone, where you can just simply record right into your phone. But you could also use tools on your desktop where it makes it easy for you to edit.  That way, if you need to, you can stop and start recording if you make a mistake, and then you can edit out the mistake and continue on without without having to record the whole thing over.  The easiest software that I like to use is called Audacity.  You can download it for free on your computer -- and I'll even link to that in the show notes, as well as a tutorial for how to get started. I think it's very user friendly. It's pretty much  “press record, press stop”  and you’ve got your audio ready to go.

Another recording software, if you use a Mac computer, is called Garage Band. I don't personally use it, but I know that many Mac users have used it.  I do think, though, that you can use Audacity on either Mac or PC, but I believe GarageBand is only Mack, so you just find what works for you.

You can even do a quick Google search and find tons of resources and tools where you can record on your desktop. The options are out there, and there's so many that it makes it easy for you to do this for your students.  After you’ve recorded, all you need to do is then save it as an MP3 file. Then, you can share that file to any digital device and have students open it up and listen to it there.

One last thing that I want to mention before I let you go today is Google Slides now has the opportunity to  add audio to any presentation, and this could be a huge game changer in your classroom.  You can't actually record directly into Google slides, yet, but you can add any audio MP3 file right into any slide in your Google presentation. So if you do something like record in Audacity or Garage Band, you can then insert that audio into your Google slides to help support learners.  This is yet one more way that you can differentiate instruction for your students. If you use Google Classroom with your students and you’re having them read an article that you've put into a Google Slides presentation, or some other sort of text, you can provide audio for some students.  It's easy for you to add in the audio and make a presentation that you share with one group of students and make the same article (or whatever that they're reading) in Google slides and provide it to another group of students without the audio. It's easy to differentiate in that way.

Okay, I've shared a lot of information with you, and hopefully you heard at least one idea that you want to try out with your students in your classroom as it relates to audio books. And if you want to go back and review any of the other ideas if you missed them, or just want to check them out one more time, you can get everything that we talked about in the show notes, including the links to some of the resources and tools that might help you in using audio books with your students.

]If you just head over to the website classroomnook.com/podcast/6, and you will get yourself all of the information that you need.  You could also sign up there to be a part of our Members Resource Library, a totally free library full of printables and student resources and teacher resources and video tutorials that can help support you in your classroom. I hope that you will check out those show notes, check out the resources and start using audio in your classroom to support your learners.

Have a wonderful day. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and I can't wait to connect again with you next week. Bye for now!