Encourage students to use the medium they know to compose their narratives. 

Having students use a technology with which they are familiar serves two purposes.  First, there is not enough time in a semester course to teach the various technologies that students will want to use, so having them to use one they know something about keeps your focus on the composing. Second, allowing them to compose in a familiar mode pushes them to explore their own experiences and can increase their self-confidence as they realize the different knowledge they already possess in various areas and the importance of that knowledge in creating their composition.

When I decided that the focus of my audio project would be music literacy in my family, I first had to consider how that story could best be told.  I actually remember listening to narrative radio programs like “Lum and Abner” when I was young.  Every Sunday morning for what seemed like a year, we ate breakfast while listening to J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit on NPR. When my parents grounded me from watching television, I found the ABC affiliate on the radio and listened to my favorite shows (after all, they had only grounded me from watching them).  That early experience gave me a template for what made a good audio narrative.  Sometimes when the “live studio audience” was laughing at something that happened on a sitcom that I was listening to, I didn’t get the joke because it was a sight gag instead of something funny in the dialogue. However, when I listened to “Lum and Abner” or The Hobbit, my imagination came to life, and I could “see” the entire story because they didn’t rely on sight to tell their stories.