Listen Edition: Great Public Radio Content

Listen Edition is a site (ListenEdition.com) that curates connect from public radio stations and combines it with high quality curriculum materials, and I'm excited about it.  I already like using stories from NPR in my classroom and I want my students to learn to listen. So often though,  what I find is a matter of chance; my students get to hear the stories I happened to hear on my way to work if I thought one of them really connected to our current unit of study. Listen Edition is curating content from lots of public radio stations I don't get to listen to, and picking the best pieces from a large pool of quality content. 

So I'm excited that Listen Edition pulls from public radio sources. I'm excited that there are great stories for students to listen to. I'm excited that there are high quality curriculum materials for each story. I'm excited that I can differentiate content and send different stories to different groups of students. And I'm happy that this is a tool we could use to get students used to the kinds of listening tasks they will have to do during Common Core testing. 

Listen Edition works on a freemium model, but I'm dissapointed that the paid version only has a site license and not a per teacher or per classroom option that would lower the barrier for teachers who want to pilot the site before going school wide with it. 

I was also really impressed by Karen Gage, COO. I met her and learned about Listen Edition here at ISTE. When I walk the floor at ISTE, especially at the start up booth, I'm really interested to see who will step out of their booth and try to bring me into their ideas. There were a lot of startups this year and they all ignored my passing, but Karen stepped out, said simply, "Do you use public radio in your classroom?" Because I do, I was intrigued by her question and I wanted to see what she was working on.

Check out ListenEdition.com if you are also interested in using great public radio content with your students.