iPod Dictations--a twist on an old favorite

Whenever I've done dictations with classes in the past, I've always had to say a hundred times, "I'm only going to say the sentence twice. Two times. I promise, I'll repeat it. And I'll say all the sentences again at the end. I promise. No, I won't go back and do number two. Just stay with me. Please." Yes, a hundred times. And that's for a four-sentence dictation. Tedious.

But I've figured out a way to use the iPods to give dictation a new twist.

First, I write a dictation that is ten sentences in length. Those ten sentences have two key components to them: the content vocabulary that we are studying in class and sentence structure that is familiar to the students. So the connecting vocabulary or verb tenses need to make sense and be familiar based on what we have been studying. At the end of a recent unit on the structure of the United States government, I had a dictation for the students that had sentences like, "The President is in the Executive branch at the National level," and we had studied the key words president, executive, and national. The frame, then, was:

The ___________ is in the ____________ branch at the ____________ level.

There were some other frames mixed in that we had used and studied along with content vocabulary from the unit.

Next, I record myself reading the dictation to the students using iMovie/iSight on my laptop computer. I repeat each numbered sentence twice. I publish the dictation out to iTunes, and it shows up ready to be loaded on the student iPods.

The students take the iPods and listen to my dictation and write down the numbered sentences. For some students, a word bank is a helpful tool for the content vocabulary. I try not to scaffold any of the sight words for them because the goal is for them to have absorbed the sentence frames at this point. After the students have written down the sentences, I have them turn in their written copy to me. This gives me a chance to assess both listening and writing/spelling issues.

For the reading/speaking portion, the students then switch on the camera on the iPod and read the dictation back to me. I give them a typed copy of the dictation to read to me so that if they made any errors in their writing, they don't transfer those errors over into the reading/speaking exercise. I ask the kids to read each sentence twice, and I listen for the best example from each piece. For assessment on this piece, I listen to the students' recordings and draw a line under any of the words that I consider to be major errors--errors that impede understanding. And I circle any specific issues that we are working on in class (right now, my students' focus is on hitting the word endings as they tend to truncate them.) In terms of scoring, I take a point off for every two major errors and 1 point off for every four issues circled.

While I haven't always been a fan of dictation in the past, there's something about adding the iPod into the mix that makes this seem pretty great. First, it allows students to self-pace. They can listen to the sentence as many times as they'd like to train their ear. Second, they can use the recorded dictation to help them practice for their reading. And again, they can hit on it as many times as they'd like. Finally, they can record themselves as many times as they'd like until they are satisfied with their own recording. This assessment is about accuracy, and it's great for the kids to pay attention to detail in their speaking periodically. And really finally (I already used finally), it's easy to give feedback because you have a recording. The kids can re-listen to their recording with your comments in hand and learn from the assessment.