How one Dalton teacher is turning podcasting into a literacy revolution
Amanda Triplett was in seventh grade when she moved from Whitfield County schools to Dalton City schools. The transition hit her like cold water.
She’d grown up surrounded by kids who looked like her, from families like hers. The county felt safe and familiar. Then seventh grade came, and suddenly she was in a big pool of diversity. Back then, there was tension between races in Dalton, and kids were often caught in the middle.
Amanda felt voiceless. She wanted to speak up but didn’t know how.
Then she met Marcus Starling.
Mr. Starling was her homeroom teacher. African American. Former pro football player. Dark-skinned and broad-shouldered. She was a pale, redheaded kid who couldn’t have looked more different.
“We couldn’t have come from more different worlds,” Amanda remembers. “But he completely changed my perception of others who looked different from me. His heart, his kindness, his love, the way he could bring all types of people together.”
In his classroom, something felt different. Amanda felt safe, like she had permission to be more honest.
“I looked forward to being in his classroom every day; he cared about our voices as much as what we learned in science,” she says. “I realized right then, one person , especially a teacher, can completely change the course of children’s lives.”
She didn’t realize it at the time, but seeds were being planted that wouldn’t sprout until decades later.
The ‘aha’ moment
As an adult, Amanda spent some time away from Dalton, then came back and got a position as an English teacher. For 15 years, she taught writing. Writing was how students found their voices, she thought. The tool that would help them say what they needed to say.
She tried to be the teacher Mr. Starling had been for her, creating space for students to speak and to be heard.
But something was still missing.
Writing worked well for some students, but others still remained silent. The ones who struggled to get words on paper. The ones whose first language wasn’t English. The ones who had stories but couldn’t find a way to tell them in an essay.
And even for the students who could write well, Amanda wondered: were they truly discovering their voices? Or were they just learning to write well for a grade?
The disconnect grew clearer over time. Students would write papers, turn them in, and get them back. Then what? The work stayed in the classroom. It was for the teacher, for a grade. Not for a real audience or a real purpose.
Then in 2020, right before COVID, Amanda went to a conference. A woman named Lauren Migaki from NPR was there, talking about the power of audio storytelling.
“It was that aha moment for me as an educator,” Amanda says. “It was what I had been searching for, the answer to unlocking silenced voices.”
Migaki shared recorded interviews and stories from people in remote areas across the country. Amanda immediately made the connection to the skills she had been working with students on: writing, storytelling, literacy, communication, problem-solving, critical thinking.
“These soft skills that our kids so desperately need were weak,” she says. “Sometimes I think we test them on the wrong things because when they leave high school, so much of what they do in high school, they really don’t use in their day-to-day careers and life.”
Podcasting addressed all of it. Research. Interviews. Writing. Recording. Editing. Beginning, middle, end. Every single literacy skill wrapped into one authentic project.
“We learn very little of what we memorize or repeat, but we learn 100% of what we can teach. And when you podcast, you have to teach about your topic.”
From the moment she discovered it, Amanda knew this was the piece education was missing.
The first win
She came back from the conference on fire. She had a classroom full of iPads and no idea what she was doing.
“I basically said, hey y’all, all we have is iPads, but let’s try to make something and just send it to this [NPR podcast] competition,” she remembers. “We won’t win. You know, there’s thousands of entries across the country, but let’s just make something and send it in.”
One of her students was Ellis Stevens, a drama kid in 7th grade. One day, a female classmate was ranting about the pressure girls face in middle school. Ellis pushed back.
“He was like, oh, no, no. If you’re a drama kid and you’re a boy in a football community, there is no pressure like that,” Amanda says.
So Ellis made a podcast about toxic masculinity. He worked on it. Kept working on it. At one point, he accidentally erased his first draft after hours of work. He slammed the classroom door and sat in the closet for a while. “But he persevered and continued, even working on it at home,” Amanda says.
When it was finished, Ellis sent it to NPR’s 2020 student podcast competition.
A few weeks later, Amanda got a call from NPR.
“I thought the kids were playing a joke on me,” she says, laughing. “I started laughing when they said, you have a top ten winner. I was like, what? I thought it was the kids messing with me.”
But it was real. Ellis Stevens, a student who had struggled as a learner before, had submitted one of the top ten student podcasts in the country.
“I watched that whole process, and I thought, okay, you know what? This is what I want to do with my life,” Amanda says. “I want to help other teachers realize the power of this tool, and I want to help kids use this tool in a way that they feel celebrated.”
How it all works
The process of creating a podcast breaks down into three phases: pre-production, production, post-production. Amanda has her students spend about a week or two on each.
The sweet spot for length is five to eight minutes. Short enough to hold attention but long enough to say something meaningful. Students edit the audio and stitch it together on Soundtrap, an affordable online editing tool.
“I think it helps kids not ramble but instead remain focused when they have a time limit,” Amanda says. “You can pack it out between five and eight minutes and have a profound podcast.”
But to get those five to eight minutes, students might need 20 to 30 minutes of audio. That’s where the real learning happens.
“We’ve taken the same ten clips, moved them around, edited them down, and it’s a whole different podcast depending on the order you put them in,” Amanda explains. “Teachers and students have no clue how many skills they’re really developing in making a quality podcast.”
The skills are intricate. Students learn to sift information for purpose. They have to decide what order to put pieces in, and wrestle with how the structure of a podcast can change its meaning.
A fourth grader made a podcast called “What About Plants?” where he discussed how we walk by thousands of plants every day without thinking about their importance. They’re putting off oxygen that we breathe and literally taking care of us. And we step on them. Don’t even notice them.
“What a wonderful insight for a fourth grader.” Amanda says. “He interviewed the principal and others, while adding his own thoughts from the things he had learned in his science class. It was just fabulous.”
Students finding their voices
One of Amanda’s students, Andrea Marsh, made a podcast called “My Melanin,” which featured an interview with her father about getting pulled over by a police officer. Andrea had been in the car, watching her father being mistreated, processing what it meant for her and her family.
The podcast won Top 10 from NPR.
“She’s a rock star,” Amanda says. “I can’t believe she’s graduating this year.”
Then there’s Gabriela Ruelas, a senior who was so shy in sixth grade she would hardly talk.
“She spoke last year at the podcast competition in front of an auditorium full of people. I mean, if you just knew what a big deal that was for her to speak; she has grown by leaps and bounds.”
Gabriela’s story isn’t the only instance of a student unlocking their confidence and passion through podcasting. Kids in Amanda’s classes continuously share what this new experience means to them:
“Ms. Triplett, no one’s ever asked me what I thought.”
“They didn’t ever tell us we could talk about that.”
“I thought it was just for a grade. This is for a purpose.”
Music to a teacher’s ears.
Building something bigger
Amanda started Speak Up Whitfield in 2020. In year one, four schools participated, submitting forty total podcasts. The event was held in a space donated by the Creative Arts Guild.
“Parents who never came to the school showed up for this,” Amanda says.
Year two: 10 schools.
Year three: 14 schools.
Year four: Over 600 people showed up to the event.
On May 14, Speak Up Whitfield will host its annual awards ceremony at the Dalton Convention Center.
And this year, they’re adding something new: Pod Jam.
Pod Jam is a unique competition where teams of one teacher and four students have five hours to produce a five-minute podcast from start to finish. They receive their topics in the morning, and in the evening there will be five judges on site to evaluate the finished products.
Believe Greater Dalton is helping launch it.
“I ran into Anna, told her about it,” Amanda says. “She lit up and said let’s get Believe involved in this. I knew immediately that she and I had similar passions about giving our local kids and community a voice.”
In 2022, Amanda founded the National Podcast Project as a nonprofit through the Dalton Innovation Accelerator. Now she’s working with teachers in Fulton, Forsyth, Rome, Chattanooga, and Lafayette. Fulton incorporated podcasting into their district curriculum this year.
One of Amanda’s top priorities in spreading the podcasting literacy phenomenon is making it accessible for everyone. She’s writing curriculum that’s actually usable, not 200 pages long. She’s recommending software and equipment that’s affordable so that schools can incorporate podcasting into their classrooms.
“A child who lives in serious poverty could make the same quality podcast as a kid who is the child of a carpet company owner,” she says. “That, to me, is so big as an educator because then it offers our kids who are used to not having what they need to be able to achieve the opportunity to do just that.”
“I want to support teachers by getting them what they need so there are no barriers to them using podcasting as a literacy tool,” she says. “And it should be used in every classroom, in math, in science, in business.”
Last year, the National Podcast Project created the Stevens Speak Up Scholarship, named after Ellis Stevens, the first year podcast leader who spoke up about toxic masculinity and won the Top 10 podcast award with NPR. Amanda hopes this will honor the work of students like Ellis, Andrea, and Gabriela who have spent years working to grow within this project.
Coming full circle
When Amanda was planning the first year of Speak Up Whitfield, she knew she needed a keynote speaker. Someone who could talk about the power of voice. Someone who understood what it meant to help young people find theirs.
And in her mind, there was only one choice.
She reached out to Marcus Starling, her seventh grade teacher. The man who’d planted those seeds all those years ago.
A few months later, Mr. Starling was on the stage, accompanied by his daughter, Shannon. Shannon is a podcaster herself.
“I don’t want to cry,” Amanda says. “But it’s been very powerful to me to come full circle.”
Now Shannon is on the National Podcast Project leadership team, and she’s leading the podcasting effort in Fulton County. The student who felt voiceless in Mr. Starling’s classroom is now working alongside his daughter to help teachers across Georgia do what he did: help students believe that their voices matter.
“If this current group of kids are not taught that their voice matters, that will never get fixed,” she says. “I want to make sure every kid, no matter their background, their legal status, whatever they bring, feels like their voice is important.”
Speak Up Whitfield & National Podcast Project
Speak Up Whitfield hosts an annual podcast competition for students across the region. This year’s event is May 14, 2026 at the Dalton Convention Center and will feature the debut of PodJam, a five-hour podcast competition. The National Podcast Project is a nonprofit providing curriculum, equipment, and training to teachers who want to incorporate podcasting into their classrooms. Schools from Atlanta to Chattanooga are now participating in the movement that started in Dalton.
