Audiocassettes
Audiocassettes are fun ways to hear a story. The background music, vocal tones of people, along with other sounds like animal or sounds of objects add to the joy of storytelling using children’s auditory sense. It is very popular as a whole among K-12 students, especially those who are visually impaired. Some school libraries that choose to check out audiocassettes, also have tape recorders on hand for check out use as well. School libraries that support teachers’ use of audiocassettes provide technology that allows for teachers to set up listening centers in their classrooms.
Advantages
- Provides excitement and sound to the learning environment, whether it is in the library, classroom, or home.
- Due to the low cost of the cassettes tapes and/or books and the cassette players, there is little worry about damage to the materials.
- Most parents are more willing to pay for audiocassettes and the items that are used with them.
- Some schools allow students to check out $5.00 cassette recorders that only play, forward, or rewind. This reduces the chances of students recording over the story.
- Students need little or no explanation about how to operate audiocassettes and cassette players.
- Teachers who have califone sets (tape recorders that have more than one earphone jack and additional earphones) in their listening centers have the advantage of letting more than one student listen to the audiocassette at one time.
Disadvantages
- Students can easily lose audiocassettes or damage them.
- For teachers whose listening centers have limited listening devices, it takes longer for all students to hear the story.
- As simple as this may sound, basic audiocassettes are not a device that is helpful to a deaf student. Other technical auditory devices are used for them, depending on the extent of their auditory challenges.
- Should the $5.00 tape recorders be a part of the check out aspect of audiocassettes, it can be very time consuming for the LMS. Making sure the batteries work is often a challenge when there is not enough help in the school library.
- Advances in technology allow students to download stories from the internet, possibly negating the eventual use of audiocassettes.
Implications for Collection Development
Audiocassettes are still popular in the K-12 setting. They can be useful to individuals and groups for narrative presentations and for other reasons. LMS, who continue to add audiocassettes to their library’s collection, should consider the fact that they are fragile and ordering the same audiocassette might be hard to do.
Copyright Considerations
Audiocassettes are a part of a library collection that has copyright requirements. Having some way to share copyright information to the school patrons relative to audiocassettes is something the LMS must always keep in mind.
Audiocassettes
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