So for our podcasting exercise, I worked with Erin and both of us had some technical difficulties with the software. We were using Aviary, and admittedly it was pretty funny that we hit record without authorizing the software so talked for about thirty seconds before realizing nothing was recording. We were running short on time once we got it all in order, so the intro and exit music does not match with the feel of the piece, oh well. Anyone who goes through and listens to each of the podcasts will forgive us I'm sure.
Onto the use of the technology. I enjoyed podcasting. I think I'd enjoy longer bursts than two minutes and could potentially talk for long stretches of time about topics that interest me. Educational or otherwise. I can easily see the use of the technology in an elementary classroom, mostly because my elementary school career, which was at a different school for each grade, included some recordings of my learning. In my fourth grade classroom in the UK for example, each week groups of four kids were taken aside to read simple stories aloud into a tape recorder, like a radio-play. At the end of the exercise, the entire class would listen to the tape. It was designed to improve sight-reading and to generate pride in literate ability, after all, who doesn't like to hear themselves talk? I always loved the exercise because I was in the advanced reader group and I knew it. (Difficult pronunciation was given a "do over" and recorded over so nobody sounded foolish on the finished tape.)
There you see, is the elementary application of the technology. I think it could be an interesting project to include for secondary education in creating non-traditional research projects. I think many secondary students would get behind a "radio show" exercise where they would get to interview a character from the books we read in English or a historical figure we've covered in Social Studies.
I would like to use the podcasting technology in my classroom in the future. Definitely more likely to use it than Twitter, but only time will tell.
More on life later,
~Ren
Considering the student as a consumer, I thought about how podcasting could be useful for my student teaching placement. Apparently, between Thanksgiving and Valentine's, the classroom size shrinks by half. I think that podcasting could be really useful for posting lectures to the class website so that students have access to the information in an additional format beyond the expectations of the syllabus, especially for such long-term absences.
ReplyDeleteUseful thought, I didn't even think about students who missed class using podcasts to catch up. I was thinking about what Kristin said about recording ourselves for that, it'd be a good idea to record those lectures though and upload them later.
ReplyDeleteRen, I'm with you on podcasting. I had some trouble with Aviary as well, but I really enjoyed the assignment as a whole, and intend to use podcasts in my own classroom.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I thought was really interesting was the point Kristin made about the potential for helping challenged students. The idea of slipping a student a little .mp3 player with a pre-loaded instructional podcast makes way too much sense to me. That's just one practical application, but I'm sure there're many more.
I'll be interested to listen to future podcasts of our peers, and continue to develop my podcasting skills.
I like your idea of a "radio show," I think students would definitely be into that. Makes me wonder if they could do something like a blog but with podcasts instead. Like, having them do a weekly episode of a podcast about something related to class kind of like we use our blog for thoughts on class.
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