Help your students build a sense of community with others!
Community Review for StoryCorps
My Take
Overall, StoryCorps is an amazing resource. What we lack so frequently in our world is a sense of community. Students (and teachers) tend to view their immediate area as the world and do not always have the opportunity to meet others from vastly different walks of life. StoryCorps enables all teachers and students to expand their horizons. What I really love about StoryCorps is the ease of searching through the website, the wide variety of content, and the provision of transcripts. When teaching ELLs and students with disabilities, a transcript can make these recordings much more accessible. The brief summaries with background information to the interviews are extremely helpful as these will help students and teachers weed through the sometimes overwhelming number of interviews available. To hear someone talk about their own life experiences can be a very powerful experience. Highly recommend this site!
How I Use It
Although I am an Instructional Technology Coach and do not have my own students, I did share this resource with my children at home, ages 13, 17, and 18. All three of them loved the ease of searching through the site and being able to learn about a variety of different people. In a classroom, I would utilize StoryCorps to support various aspects of Social Studies or English classes. The wide variety of stories available enables this resource to be utilized in almost any classroom. For younger students, I would definitely recommend that teachers make the determination of which stories students will listen to or pick from. For older students, this would be a great introduction to lessons or an extension activity. Students could listen to the recording, then apply their knowledge of those events in a reflective essay. These stories could also be used as a springboard for class discussions.