Teach42

Simul-blogged on On The Cutting Edge-ucation

I love podcasting. I love listening to other educators try to wrap their minds around new ideas and figure out how to incorporate them into their own individual arenas. I love creating podcasts. It is mind boggling how many new people I’ve met through these half hour rants that I put out there weekly. However, as much as I love everything about podcasting, I still question just how influential it’s going to be in elementary education. I can think of so many ways to make use of it but when you boil it all down, it’s really no different than many other pieces of technology; it’s just one more tool to throw in the ol’ tech toolbox.

Dennis Dunleavy addressed podcasting in a recent post of his.

Q: How do you think this technology can be best utilized in education.

A: This an important question that needs to be explored. The novelty of podcasting and the ease in which it can be done overshadows, at the moment, the true potential. Steve Sloan is concerned about the limits of podcasting in terms of accessibility for the hearing impaired. Ideally, a transcription of the audio would also be made available for syndication.

I think the technology of podcasting can best benefit learning by allowing education to become even more portable than ever. Podcasting cannot replace the classroom but it is one more way to meeting students where they live — on the Internet and on iPods. I think of all this technology as supplemental to the classroom experience and interaction with professors. The technology can best be utilized in education by figuring out how students learn best in a digital information-rich society.

Podcasting can supplement the classroom experience. It doesn’t replace anything. It really falls under the same category as iMovie and Power Point: tremendously powerful tools that can easily overshadow the learning process.

I think a mistake that many educators make is that they find a great tool and then they try figure out how they can change their curriculum to make use of it. It’s like getting a new hammer for your birthday and than walking around the house trying to find things to pound.

We should be looking at our curriculum critically and trying to figure out what we’re doing well and what could be improved by using some of the tools we have at our disposal. It’s great that we have this tool, podcasting, but it’s just the newest and shiniest tool in the box. And since it has the word “pod” in it, it’s probably slick looking and white.

I’m still not sold on the idea that in a few years we’re going to be seeing hundreds of elementary school students podcasting. I get the feeling that it may supplement some school activities, but I don’t think it’s going to replace much. If there are hundreds of students podcasting, I doubt it will be on school grounds. I could see students taking over their own little niches and podcasting independently.

The key difference between Internet radio and podcasting is that podcasting is subscribable and time shifted. It’s really designed for content that is going to be distributed on a semi-regular basis. It doesn’t need to be weekly, or even monthly, just often enough that someone would want to subscribe to it. I’m having difficulty coming up with reasons that classrooms would have students creating this sort of content on a regular basis, rather than just for a project or two. I can imagine schools using it to provide information to parents and students, teachers using it to share material with each other, or classes using it as a newsletter of sorts, but I’m just not sure individual students will be creating audio content like this on a regular basis.

However, this wave is just barely beginning it’s approach to the shore. We have yet to see how high its really going to be. Once we have a few million teachers thinking along these lines, I get the feeling we’re going to be very surprised at the ideas people come up with. I guess you could say I’m still slightly skeptical but with very high hopes.

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