Professional Learning for Busy Educators

This year, NPR held its first Student Podcast Challenge — a podcast contest for students in grades 5 through 12. As we listened to the almost 6,000 entries, we smiled, laughed, and even cried. Students opened their lives to us with stories about their families, their schools and communities and their hopes for the future.

We named our winners last month — the eighth graders of Bronx Prep Middle School in New York, and the eleventh graders of Elizabethton High School in Tennessee.

But lots of other students blew us away. Here, for your listening pleasure, are just some of the many podcast entries that made us smile — and reminded us what it's like to be in middle and high school.