To begin with, I’m not totally new to podcasting though I certainly can’t call myself adept either. I’ve used Audacity to record a sample podcast for the RMS website thinking I would like to include some made by students to the site. Well, you know what they say about good intentions. I’d talked to one teacher about using some of her students to do this but nothing ever came of it. Not to blame her though…teachers just have too much going on at RMS to consider anything more than getting done what has to be done. There are few “extras” these days, sad to say.
Well, back to topic…to begin with I looked at the ones created by students and was really impressed with RadioWillowweb. I liked how the students were talking about what they had been learning. Students could podcast things like this and also use the casts as means of review, quizzing, celebrations, news, etc. I also like the website in general. I learned how they are also using handheld computers ( palms ) in their school. It’s something I’d like to bring up with my principal to see if it’s something he’d like to do.
I also listened to a couple of casts from The Tech Teachers under the Educators tab. I didn’t find them all that useful as they basically highlighted “tech toys.” It was just okay for me. After this, I looked at the selections of Podcast Alley, Learn Out Loud but only found them to contain marginal collections. It’s probably because I was looking for fun things to do with technology in education and the tech tabs were not that. So I decided to download iTunes. Wow! It truly is the big dog in the pack. What a selection. I’m also impressed with the interface. Now I’ve not spent a huge amount of time poking around in the collection because I’ve got to move on here (been 3 days attempting to do this “thing”), but I decided to look for something library-ish and found “The Classic Tales,” but to tell you the truth, I can’t remember where I started to get there. I’ll go back and look later, but really like it. At one time, for a short time, I could tune into One Word Radio which is broadcasted out of the UK. It’s programming was strictly literature where parts of English lit were read aloud…portions every day…different titles throughout the day. Well, soon US IP addresses were blocked. Oh well, it’s now no longer in business, but the point is I liked that kind of thing and could not find anything like it in the US. Well, this chapter-a-day stuff that some of the podcasts offer is pretty close. This I like. I’ll check out the tech stuff more later.
Yes, I could see how all this could be used in a classroom setting. The podcasts that pertained to subject areas studied could be downloaded and students could definitely create their own. I think they’d like that and I know it’s not difficult to do it. I’ll try again to get something going.