I recently had the chance to work with a teacher at Strongsville High School on a project project funded by the Toyota Tapestry Foundation and the Strongsville Education Foundation.

Mindy Bedrossian and I met when she took the Podcasting Academy workshop at WVIZ Ideastream in Cleveland, Ohio. Soon after taking the workshop, she contacted me concerning an idea for a grant she had called Generation to Generation and was working to secure the funding through The Toyota Tapestry Foundation.

The grant involved recording the oral history of local senior citizens about what life was like before the scientific revolution. The recording and interviews were all to be done by the students in Mindy’s classroom. The project description read:

The years from 1900 to 1999 saw the most dramatic changes in the history of mankind in science, technology, warfare, transportation, and health. From horses to the space shuttle, slide rules to computers, leeches to chemotherapy, and from libraries to the Internet, the advances of this past century has changed society forever. Students will visit the elderly and record their stories about what life was like before antibiotics, refrigeration, chemotherapy, and computers. These very important primary sources will soon be gone, and their testimonies of how life drastically changed for them will soon disappear forever. Students will then create pod casts of these interviews, developing a permanent audio collection of primary sources for future generations.

It was a lot of fun to see the skills Mindy learned in the Podcast Academy workshop put to use with students. The edited versions of the podcast were very nicely done and the amount of primary source information that the students collected and will be retained was amazing. It was very interesting to hear all the details of how things were done before we have the modren tools we take for granted today.

The project has caught the attention of many people in the community. It has been featured on WKYC TV-3 with Romona’s Kids and Mindy was recently accepted to travel to a conference in Calf. to speak about her experience with Generatiion to Generation.

I had looked at Mind’s website this morning and saw that she was featured on NPR recently. She has already clued me in that there is another production in the works for next year. I don’t know what is involved yet’ but this was so much fun, I can’t wait to get started!

Check out the Generation to Generation Podcasts at this link.