I've Been Introduced to Podcasting
Last year, I accidentally learned how to save a student's media project as a podcast. We had created very cool clay animations using a little plastilina, a digital camera, and iMovie. (I would love to show an example of this, but unfortunately the laptop that stored the finished products was stolen.) However, there was one student who was so excited about his animation that he wanted to save a personal copy. We couldn't find an unused CD to save it on in the office, so we played around with sharing/exporting options in iMovie. He emailed it to himself, but the quality wasn't great. So we saved it as a podcast and downloaded it to his iPod. He showed it to absolutely everyone he could get to watch it. Saving the project as a podcast took one laptop out of circulation for the next class period because it took so long and we didn't want another student to accidentally (or intentionally) mess it up. This might not be a realistic option for every student project given my resources...
Since that experience, for obvious reasons, I've been interested in learning more about podcasting in classroom projects. Isn't that what learning is supposed to look like--engagement, collaboration, and pride in the product? I think now, after this week's reading and my blog assignments so far, I have my missing link, which is where to store the files and how to embed them in a blog or on a web page so that they can be published. Luckily, right now I have a Media Mill account, but the general public can open an account at Our Media (or probably some very smart technology integration specialist could set up a district server or something for that purpose).
My husband gave me my first iPod for Christmas. I started out borrowing CDs to load from friends who are cooler than I am, but I soon got bored with the music. Then, I started downloading podcasts, which I listen to primarily while I exercise. My favorite podcast subscription is from NPR: Driveway Moments. It's free, short, and extraordinarliy interesting. Six driveway moments can get me to jog around Wood Lake. I decided I would relearn French during my sabbatical by listening to The French Podclass. I started from the beginning of the series (there are approximately 100 episodes available on iTunes now) and have noted how Sabastien has added production value. The episodes are chunked like good lesson plans with a variety of listening experiences--usually a vocabulary lesson, a conversation, a song, a media clip and a film review. Two French Podclasses = 3 miles jogging slowly. For a while, I was listening to another NPR show, Speaking of Faith, because it gave me great writing prompts and made me feel all spiritual jogging in the nature center. These episodes feature thought-provoking interviews and book excerpts. A really good Speaking of Faith podcast (like the one on Einstein's Ethics) can increase my workout from 30 to 50 minutes. I'm noticing that I like podcasts that were originally aired on traditional broadcast radio, and I haven't yet developed a taste for those created directly for a digital environment.
The value of podcasts for students, in my opinion, would be more like Spencer's excitement over keeping and sharing his animation. I see it as primarily motivational. In his forthcoming textbook, Professor Beach considers also how creating podcasts shapes a student's writing experience in terms of considering audience: the sound of words, the rhythm of sentences, engaging content and voice, narrowing information, including variety of types of information, and planning for interactivity by creating show notes or a way to solicit audience comments.
Peter Schmidt, an Instructor at Swarthmore, used podcasting in a literature course and points out that the podcasts (example mp3s) didn't replace traditional papers and exams, but did supplement them well. His students reported on course evaluations that they really enjoyed the podcasting assignments.
During this week's idea sharing and reading, I had (or stole) these great ideas for using podcasts in my classroom:
1. Add a "soundseeing tour" of my school to my digital writing unit.
2. Teach research skills by producing a weekly class radio show for marking period (my magic 20 days). My students are experts on so many things that aren't considered cool for school, but those topics can be great for research--like tagging/street art, death metal, vampire culture, the drug economy, etc. These topics lend themselves to ethnography and interview as well as traditional research. Initially, I see these roles that students (or small groups of students) could rotate through each week: producer, researcher, script writer, text editor, sound editor/engineer, host/reader, and tech support. In my setting, it would be best to work on this as a whole class project, but in the mainstream I could see several groups working on different topics at the same time and producing an archive of podcasts at the end of the unit. This seems more authentic than writing a paper and is more in line with my current interest in performance of understanding and arts-infused curriculum.
3. Assign podcasts in characters' voices, or create a sound collage/montage of a class text including text excerpts.
4. Assign partner podcasts where one student reads a passage of a class text and other student comments on it. Use the podcasts to begin classroom discussions.
5. Assign small groups sections of the course content to review in a podcast before tests.
6. podTheater
7. Regular "coursecasts" to communicate with parents and students.
Podcasting Resources:
Youth Radio
Apple iPod in the Classroom
Education Podcast Network
Teachers Teaching Teachers
