This podcast will make part of the introductory level of an online course targeting young people (12-20 years old) with Arabic origins that have been raised in English speaking countries. The course is an attempt to re-attach these young individuals to their origins and restore their pride in their Arabic language and culture. Rather than being a traditional language course, its main goal is encouraging the young learners to go ahead and become curious to explore the beauty and authenticity of their culture and language.
The objective of the introduction is to make these individuals who usually suffer from deculturation, confusion and sometimes exclusion to know that they are not alone and that there are thousands of people living their experience and that it’s ok and positive.
Making them listen to others telling their own stories in a young fresh way is an attempt to provide a real, interesting entry point to the course using a simple story-telling approach with the voice of the young people themselves.
An activity that involves that the participants provide their own podcasts (recordings) is foreseen after this resource.
For this activity, I decided to create an interview podcast. Based on the nature of the audience targeted in the learning experience, a smart selection of the used instructional tools must be made. Young people are always busy doing something. They have a short attention span and they find it intimidating and frustrating to be obliged to listen to instructional content for more than 5-10 minutes. I think a short interview with a person of the same age is a good approach to inspire them and to deliver the required message. Listening to a podcast can be done anytime, anywhere, while they are waiting for a bus or for a school lesson to start, or even while they are busy doing something else.
As for the tools: I used audacity for recording and editing the voice.
In the beginning, I have selected some royalty free background music from audiohub then I decided not to use the music and to keep the voice clear and simple.
To publish the podcast, I used an interesting online free tool sounder.fm that provides podcast hosting service and gives you the ability to produce a professional podcast output.