Remember I've blogged a couple of times about Podcasting, which is the combination of blog technology and mp3 players, like IPods. Well, now there's a blog dedicated to research in Educational Uses of Podcasting and author Steve Sloan offers these preliminary ideas:
In my opinion Podcasting is a great tool:
* for distance learning
* to facilitate self-paced learning
* for remediation of slower learners
* to allow faculty to offer advanced and or highly motivated learners extra content
* for helping students with reading and/or other learning disabilities
* for multi-lingual education
* to provide the ability for educators to feature guest speakers from remote locations
* to allow guest speakers the ability to present once to many sections and classes
* to allow educators to escape the tedium of lecturing
* to offer a richer learning environment
He also talks about a teacher who instead of asking his students to buy a textbook, gave them their textbook in mp3 format that they could download to their IPods. Wow. Wouldn't that be cool!
Here are some more ideas about how I think Podcasting could be valuable in schools. Now, I know what you're saying, "IPods are too expensive. Nobody will have an IPod at my school." Think outside the box! DVD players are now 15 bucks at the bookstore. IPods will get cheaper in future years.
Here are some ideas:
- Foreign language: A daily conversation in the language being learned that students have to listen to. Maybe at key points of the conversation, they record their voices responding to one of the characters. Then they send their recordings by rss to their teachers' IPod for assessing.
- Students taking turns summarizing the day's lesson for the rest of the class to review if they wish
- English Literature students realizing there is more than one way to tell a story (i.e. you don't always have to write good literature, you can speak it too).
- Student presentations recreating events from history (you might not be able to make the French revolution look good on video with a bunch of high schoolers, but maybe you could recreate it well on audio)
- Personal reflection journals that are spoken, instead of written
- Journalism students could learn radio journalism instead of just print journalism, which would give them all more to do anyway (I know, I did journalism in high school and played a lot of tetris)
- Maybe even the yearbook students could create weekly audio "yearbooks" that keep students connected throughout the year instead of just one published book at the end of the year.
etc. etc.
I think there are many more ideas, but I want to hear them from you! Any other ideas?
