Podcasting and revising texts

I just read an article in the March 2009 Reading Teacher journal about how podcasts can help students revise their stories. The experiment was conducted with a 5th grade class where students had written stories and posted them to their blogs. The teacher struggled to get kids to do more than cursory checks of grammar and spelling when she asked them to revise, so she decided to create podcasts of her reading each story. She uploaded the podcasts to each student's blog and the students then followed the text of their story as she read. Doing so enabled them to see where their audience (in this case the teacher) struggled to make meaning or where the teacher interpreted meaning differenly than they had intended.

The article talked about the difficulty of initially setting this up--creating the podcasts was easy, if time consuming, but getting the kids to access both text and podcast at the same time on the computer and focus on the assignment and not the design playing out on the screen was a challenge. She also said that because of the time involved, this isn't an something to be done for every assignment. I really appreciated this honesty. So often ideas like this are presented in a glorious light which makes me immediately skeptical.

I think there is some merit to this idea, as I often tell kids to read their stories aloud to proof or revise. Your ear catches what you eye does not. But for a secondary teacher with 150 students--is it feasible? How could it be arranged so students created podcasts of each other's essays? Could volunteers create the podcasts?