PODCASTING

Since I did not know what Podcasting was prior to this week’s lesson, I learned a lot about it. Anyone with a microphone or video camera and internet access can create a show for a podcast. Users who like what they see or hear can subscribe for future issues of the podcast, allowing them to filter what they would like streamed to them based upon their preferences. Podcasts can be used in the classroom to educate students with a wide variety of lectures and videos. My son’s Language Arts class is equipped with iPods so that the students can use them to listen to grammar lessons. I did not actually realize that the lessons were podcasts until now. According to him, the podcasts are pretty entertaining and the students get a lot more out of them than they would listening to the teacher lecturing them about a dry subject. 

Podcasting is very similar to some of the other Web 2.0 applications. Just like social networking sites, blogs, and YouTube videos, users can subscribe to their favorite sites to have new podcasts streamed directly to them. While the material from these sources may vary in terms of format, the premise of subscribing to a site for the purpose of receiving share information is the same. Like podcasts, wikis are also a concentration of collective material about a given subject, but wikis differ because there are multiple contributors working on an ever-changing content. Social bookmarking and web quests can almost be considered the opposite of the other user subscribed aps. Web quests are typically produced by teachers, and are a creative way to present students with an online research assignment. With social bookmarking, researchers come upon sites marked as relevant by others, and contribute by marking sites they find useful. In both of these aps, the originator has laid out the groundwork, but the bulk of the researching is being done by the user. Unlike the other formats, these two aps are not spoon-feeding the user their material so much as they are directing them where to go to research it for themselves.

I use my iPod primarily when I go to the gym or out walking for exercise. I put a lot of songs on it when I originally got it a few years ago, but I haven’t really added to it since then. I probably don’t get as much use out of it as I could. However, in a classroom I can absolutely see the advantages of allowing students to independently listen to lectures, with the ability to go back and listen to something more than once if they are having difficulty understanding it. The advantage to teachers is that they do not having to repeat the same lecture over and over again throughout the day, giving them time to work on something else. The only disadvantage that I can see would be if students were using their own iPods, rather than the school’s. It would be difficult to be certain that they were actually listening to the assigned material, rather than music or something else they’d downloaded. Of course, it would likely be evident by their scores on the correlated assignment. For the most part though, podcasting is an excellent way to both store and access a wide variety of educational material.