Podcasting

This week was my first experiences with podcasting. I must be honest and say that podcasting is not my favorite tech tool. However, I am impressed with the possibilities that it has for both personal uses and as well as educational.

Podcasting takes some time to get used to in order to find the most appropriate and most interesting for an individual or your classroom. I was not too impressed with www.podcastalley.com . I was not able to narrow a search to specific topics. It made it difficult to search for content specific podcasts. I did use the Education Podcast Network at http://epnweb.org/ and was successful in narrowing searches for grade level, specific fields, and was all related to education. I searched through topics of several others and found many to have recordings of conferences, seminars, and classroom recordings. I did not spend much time searching for music. I do not own an Mp3 player or iPod. I do see the benefits that it may have for the person on the go. It would be nice to download the music for when you are driving to work, working out, or traveling. I just don’t have the time or patience to search for the right music or podcast to listen to, download it, and remember to listen to it! Guess I need to slow down and enjoy the new toys of the times.

EPN had links to Teachtopia, http://teachtopia.com/educational-podcasts.html, where I listened to some podcasts through www.radio.com about children’s books. There were interviews of awards winning authors of children’s books. I thought that this would be a great teaching resource when introducing students to a new book. Parts of the podcast were directed to children and would allow for connections to be made by the child. Another new podcast that was available was teaching tips, http://teachtopia.com/teaching-tips.html. It had just had its first podcast on Thursday. There was music incorporated and appears to be a great, quick resource for technology tips and teaching resources for teachers.

Podcasting is not something that you will find me doing daily, but it is good to be familiar with its capabilities. I must agree that there is a great deal of uses for podcasts in the classroom. It will be interesting over the next few months and years as to how I will incorporate them into my teaching. I wish you all the best and let me know if you have found some fun ways!

Jen

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Comment by The Maze on November 25, 2007 at 7:39pm: Dear Jen-

I have been podcasting with my students for about 9 months and have found it to be an amazing tool. I teach inclusion social studies classes at the secondary level and have created review podcasts for my students to help them with retention of material needed for state and my assessments. They download the "masterycasts" into their iPods and listen to them repeatedly.

The success of this led me to build a website over the summer which we just launched last month. The site holds the podcasts and is what I hope to be the beginning of a place to share my work and the work of other interested teachers. The beauty of podcasting is the rss! My students need only look for the first podcast and subscribe. They will automatically receive the others when they sinc their iPods!

My students use these all the time as they are very comfortable with the technology. The other great thing about them is that they can listen whenever they want and no one knows they are studying! This is a big plus for my students!

So welcome, and keep looking. ITunes has many as well, although I agree not easily catalogued. I am now a listener, big time!

If you are interested in creating them, I recommend Audacity for starters. It is free open source and pretty user friendly. It is where I began.

Good Luck and let me know if I can help! Visit my site and listen to the MasteryCast episode on the podcast page. Browse the Subjects pages for the work I am doing with my students!

www.masterymaze.com

Sue Palmer

Comment by Joy Daviduk on November 25, 2007 at 8:36pm: Jen,
I think alot has to do with the age of your students. I believe in the High School arena the students are more capable and open to the technology. They typically have a free rein to computers, and typically own an I-Pod of their own.

Although I see many ways to utilize the Pod Casts with Elementary students, in ways such as reading books, enabling parents to be a more active participant in knowing what the student is doing weekly, and having the students create their own talking Journals, it would be more difficult with the Early Elementary grade students.

I also found Audacity very helpful and user friendly for myself. Uploading the PodCast was very easy on the site I used. I hope you can find a use for the Pod Cast in your future because I believe it is a useful tool in all areas of Education.
Joy

Podcasting

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