A

Do you listen to podcasts? Podcasts are radio shows that can take almost any form. They can be a news report or a one-act play; a formal interview or a friendly conversation; a fictional story or a book review.

In our eighth annual Student Podcast Contest, we invite teenagers to submit original podcasts of five minutes or less. Your creation can be about anything that interests you, in any form that you like.

Rules

·You must be a student aged 13 to 18 in middle school or high school and have parent or guardian permission to participate.

·Be sure to use non-copyrighted sound effects or music and list their sources in the submission form.

·Upload your podcast to Sound Cloud, a popular podcasting site, to make it easier for our judges to listen to your work.

·Please be sure to check the length of your work before submitting. Just to be very clear,5:01 is longer than five minutes.

Resources for Participants

·A unit plan on writing for podcasts, which includes writing clues to inspire your work; a sample text featuring past winners of our contest; a lesson plan that focuses on storytelling, interviewing, editing and producing.

·A recorded online workshop on writing for podcasts, in which you’ll hear from a school librarian with experience teaching podcasting to students, our podcast producers and previous student winners of our contest.

·Three short videos from two audio producers and one student contest winner—they share tips on how to plan and record meaningful podcasts.

Evaluation Process

Your work will be listened to by producers and journalists on the podcast team as well as by professional podcasters, educators and staff members from our website. Keep in mind that the work you send in should be appropriate for our audience—that is, something that could be published in a family newspaper. The winners will be announced about two months after the contest has ended and their works will be featured on our website. Unfortunately, our team does not have the capacity to provide individual feedback.