The Radio Show - Storage Devices

This task will help students to improve their listening skills. They must listen carefully to a radio show that lasts about 16 minutes and answer 35 questions, the answers for which are all in the Radio Show.

1) Go through on the whiteboard what a bit is (a switch with two positions), and how grouping 8 bits into one byte means that you can have 256 different codes. These codes can then be allocated to every key on the keyboard. The set of codes is known as ASCII. Experience shows that this part of the Radio Show is hard for students to visualise so a preamble on what a byte is is really helpful.

2) Click here to download the zip file of the Radio Show. Inside the zip file, you will find an MP3 of the Radio Show, a transcript and the 35 questions in a Word document.

3) Ensure students have access to a computer with headphones rather than broadcasting it to the whole class. 

4) Put the 35 questions in a public area on your network, so students can download and add their answers to their own copy, straight into a word processor.

5) Remind students that you expect 100% correct answers because all the answers are in the Radio Show! They can pause and rewind as many times as they like to get the right answers - it's not a race!

6) Students who finish first can look up ASCII, find an ASCII table, write their own name in ASCII codes, use an ASCII art generator to create pictures, look up Dropbox and watch a video on cloud storage etc.

7) When everyone has finished, the teacher can go through the answers with the class.

8) The class can then use their answers to create a mind map.

9) Students should then go though Bitesize and other websites, looking at their notes on storage and adding any key points that they don't have yet.