Utilizing MP3s in the College Classroom

Earlier this year, as I was teaching my Developmental Reading and Writing students, I noticed that during the break, they would immediately plug in their MP3 players or smart phones and begin listening to music files. They would also share music with one another. That started me thinking about how to utilize their interest in music to get them more interested in what I was teaching in the classroom. Many of my students struggle with note-taking and other traditional ways of learning new material. I thought that if I could grab their attention with MP3s, then perhaps, they could "tune into" short segments or portions of my lectures on writing and even on grammar rules, and listen at their leisure when they were doing their assignments outside the classroom. Often I had overheard students comment that by the time they got around to doing the assignment, they had forgotten the exercises and skills we had gone over in a previous class. I simply took my traditional slide presentations (PowerPoint) and wrote a short script to go with each skill we covered in class. I limited my MP3 recording to no more than two minutes because I wanted it to be about the length of a song. Next, I am learning to use GarageBand on my Mac because one of my students showed me how to make my own beats. Then, I can open my MP3s with original music and that will really get their attention!