At Jamestown Elementary in Arlington, Virginia, media director Camilla Gagliolo teamed up with the Smithsonian for a project that took full advantage of the portability of podcast technology. Jamestown’s fifth-grade class turned field trips into podcast field reporting on visits to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and National Zoo.

The project was structured as a KWL lesson (what I know, what I want to know and learn). As a reflection of the lesson, the podcast episodes were arranged in three sections: Pre-Visit, The Visit, and Post-Visit.

Before the Visit

Before the trips to the Smithsonian, the students learned that they would study mammals, paying particular attention the similarities and differences between species. In the museum’s Mammal Hall, they would see taxidermied specimens and fossils. At the zoo, they would see live mammals in something closer to a natural state. Before seeing either, they would do classroom Internet research on mammals.

In preparation for the trips, each student filled out answers to worksheet questions: What do you really want to see and why? What do you hope to learn about and why? Their answers were the basis for the Pre-Visit episodes. They used iPods equipped with microphones to record predictions of what they would discover on the visits and the questions about mammals that they hoped to have answered.