This morning the children of Westwood Radio had the privilege of taking part in a truly international and intercontinental live interview with Russell Prue who was broadcasting Live from Dubai on NetSupportRadio at the GESS 2017 Conference!
Broadcasting from the World Trade Centre at 3pm local time and 11am GMT, Russell linked up with us on Skype and we were able to have a fascinating conversation about our radio station, what we enjoy about school radio and how we put together our broadcasts each week. With their usual eloquence and enthusiasm, the children were superb, answering questions from Russell and also from some local students who took part in the broadcast, which was a great experience for everyone and an interesting cultural discussion.
Here are both sides of the microphone, with Russell in Dubai and us in our Westwood Radio studio. Listen again using the player below.
This week’s group have been hard at work this lunchtime planning a fantastic show for Friday. With the usual class news PLUS some special features and, hopefully, an interview with one of our parents who only won the Bath Half Marathon Women’s race!
We’d love you to get in touch and this week Izzy is on the emails so she will be waiting for your emails and texts to read out live during the show. 078600 17404 is the text number and radio@westwoodwithiford.org is our email. Here is this week’s show order:
This afternoon after school radio club met again and this week we have been working on our broadcasting technique. This included the way in which we introduce ourselves, handovers, intros and outros, along with playing beds under people when they are speaking and using a range of jingles to make our broadcasts varied.
For today’s session, the children were asked to speak unscripted about their class visits that they had been on this week. With confidence growing week on week and Luke and Lennie doing a tremendous first time job on the mics and jingles, it was another fantastic session.
Today was another fantastic broadcast by our team which included an interview with Mrs Sage, one of our TAs, some special reports on Lotus and Orchid class trips and the usual mix of top stories, class and community news. Our song choices for today were Rock a bye by Clean Bandit and Skin by Rag n Bone man. Rock a bye was a clear favourite and we had some great shout outs to read too. Thank you to everyone for joining in. Here is the show to listen again, along with a special ‘behind the scenes’ video of how it looks from our side of the mic when we are on air.
As you know I am always trying to promote our children’s amazing work by drawing as wide an audience as possible to our blogs and websites. Tonight I was particularly thrilled:
This afternoon we started our new radio club as every term we like to give all children in the school the opportunity to develop their broadcasting skills by working together to learn the techniques and have fun with school radio. Our latest 10 children to come along were just fantastic and worked together so well from the start.
We spent today getting used to talking into a microphone and listening to our own voices through our headphones, which is always something quite unusual to begin with! By adding in some jingles to punctuate our speech we were then able to begin practicing our handovers. Everyone worked hard and we had a lot of fun along the way too, which is what it is all about. Next week we will be taking our skills on even further and develop our intros and outros. Here is our very first recording together. Well done to Sophie on the jingles and Henry on the mics. If you enjoyed the group’s work, please leave them a comment! Enjoy.
Have you got a question for our radio team that you would like answered live on air with a shout out too? Leave us a comment here and when we plan our next show we will include a Q&A as an extra feature!
Today we broadcast once again live online to the community and the world on World Book Day. What strikes me is that with every passing week and show, the children become even more confident, more professional and put together a show that is just superb. Today’s was no exception, with some lovely features including the usual school news, but also some fabulous world news from Charlie and fantastic BBC 500 word performances live in the studio from Oscar and Finn.
With a focus on Orchid class blog and their myths and legends posts – orchid.westwoodblogs.org if you fancy having a read – and all the weather you need to know for the weekend, this was another example of top class school radio broadcasting. here is the show to listen again:
This morning we broadcast our last breakfast show with the members of the current radio club as this week the group will be changing. Once again, the children chose their own features and wrote superb scripts which they delivered with professionalism and clarity – it was a pleasure to stand back and watch them work. Even with our chosen song – Rag and Bone Man’s ‘Human’ -edited out for copyright reasons, the children still put together a fabulous show of almost 20 minutes. If you missed it, you can listen again here or on radio.westwoodwithiford.org/latest-show and there are some photos of the show too.
Well done everyone and thank you for being so enthusiastic and committed. Top broadcasting and such a fun way to start a week. I hope you enjoyed it.
Blogging about our broadcasting on radio.westwoodwithiford.org
