Lesson Re-Design

I taught a grade ten academic English class on my practicum, and we read Lord of the Flies by William Golding.  In addition to using lots of different approaches and activities, I chose to scaffold the unit through giving them basic comprehension questions for new chapters, then the next day they worked on interpretive questions in groups, and finally moral and thematic questions were explored through supplementary material.

Since the point of this lesson redesign post is to incorporate another semiotic system into my existing lesson, I am going to change up how I presented a radio podcast to my class.  I love radio, and in particular, I love the program This American Life for its many different voices and stories.  It's wonderful.  And their entire wonderful archive is accessible online for free.  I think radio podcasts fit extremely well with the oral communication strand of the curriculum, especially the overall expectation "listening to understand" and many of the specifics that fall under it.  The first time I used radio in the classroom, our novel had led us to a discussion about fear, and we were discussing the impact of fear on the characters' motivations.  I played a reading of Michael Bernard Loggins' "Fears of your Life" to facilitate discussion about rational fear versus irrational fear, and whether they are experienced the same way or differently.  Here is a summary of the hook and the action that I used.

Hook: Students write as many of their fears as they can in one minute.  If students can't think of any, they can write down fears that they believe are common.

Action: Students make a T-Chart with two columns, one for "rational fears" and one for "irrational fears."  Students recieve a handout with the transcript of the radio podcast that they will listen to, for reference.  Students listen to"Fears of Your Life" and write down any fears that they see falling into one of these two categories.  On the board, the teacher will draw a T-chart, take up student responses and facilitate discussion.  Students can talk about both fears in the radio piece and fears from their lists that they wrote at the start of class.  Be sure to discuss how the boys experience fear in Lord of the Flies, whether their fear is rational or irrational, and how it causes them to act.

I think that this lesson could be greatly improved by including a slideshow with text and images to add to the listening experience.  I once included a text slideshow with a different lesson's podcast, and it made a huge improvement to the students' level of engagement.  Compared to having the text in handout form, with a slideshow, they listened very well since they couldn't help but follow along with the text on the screen.  With the handout they read ahead and the impact of the speaker's words became lost.  Micheal Bernard Loggins' piece in particular has the potential for some amazing, fun images to be put along to it.  Consider the following excerpt: "Fear of sharks. Fear of giant man. Fear of gorilla. Fear of Godzilla." How much fun would it be to make a slideshow with those images?  Or you could even use Animoto to take Youtube clips from Godzilla, Jaws, etc.  My question though, and hopefully one of you readers can help me with this - If I include pictures and text with a radio podcast, am I potentially not meeting the oral communication expectations in the curriculum by turning it into something visual?  Or am I aiding them in engaging with an oral text?