Sometimes, especially as we head for the end of the school year, we want a project students can "noodle on" for a while, something that incorporates the skills and knowledge they've gained over the past academic year. This month's One Lesson at a Time guest, Connecticut middle school librarian Melissa Thom, is bringing just such a project our way.

Melissa is not only a great school librarian, she is also the co-host of the Joyful Learning Podcast, which launched in September of 2022. For this lesson, she's taken the experience of learning how to podcast and brought it to her students in a unit that encourages students to find their interests and share them with the world.

While it's important for students to get information literacy lessons to help them be careful consumers of information, it's also important for students to learn how to express themselves and share their knowledge with the wider world. That's exactly what Melissa is sharing with us in this month's featured lesson, "Learning through Podcast Creation"!

Melissa's unit is a great way to tie together research skills, information literacy, media literacy, and digital citizenship in a neat bundle. And not only is this unit great for students to recall and implement knowledge and skills, it could also be an engaging way for the school librarian to collaborate with teachers. As a former English teacher, I can assure you I would have leapt at the chance to have students submit a final project demonstrating their topic knowledge that I could have listened to, rather than having to read a pile of papers!

(And maybe it's a little tricky, but perhaps this could also be a chance to demonstrate to teachers how to give verbal feedback for an assignment. Then everyone learns!)

Whether you plan to implement this lesson to close out this school year or pocket it for use next year, I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Melissa, and that you have a restful, rejuvenating summer!

Here is a breakdown of our conversation:

Revisit our guests from One Lesson at a Time: Season One and our current season here!