Podcasts

Podcasts are new to me and honestly it made me feel old and out of date when I was trying to navigate around the itunes website. I stuck it through and managed to figure it out though! So as you can imagine, this particular assignment has truly opened my eyes to an entirely different way to teach and learn not only in the classroom but also as continuing ed.

The first podcast I listened to was SmartBoard Lessons. I listen to a few of the episodes to get a better idea of how this works and also trying to figure out if it would be useful to me as an educator. After listening to a few I saw how addictive podcasting can be. The SmartBoard Lessons podcast had sponsorships and seemed to be one that has been around for sometime. I thought it was wonderful that you could connect to folks from all over the world. This podcast also had music playing in the opening of the cast which I thought was a nice touch. There was also a great deal of advertisement in this podcast.

KidCast by Dan Schmit was very different from the SmartBoard Lessons podcast. This podcast had no opening music and was only one guy talking. Although it seemed more boring than the first podcast I actually got some great ideas from him. I felt he did a much better job explaining how to use podcast in the classroom. The title of the episode I listen to was "Medium is not the message." He referred to using podcasts in the classroom as "extended academic conversation." Overall this podcast seemed to be the one that was the most boring to listen to even though I got the best information for this one.

EdTechtalk was similar to the first podcast that I listen to in the fact that they were speaking from all over the world. This podcast used skype and had teachers from New York, New Hampshire and Europe. Not only did they uses skype to make these connection, but they also used chatrooms. I did not notice any sponsors as the first podcast but they did utilize music and I thought that was a nice touch.

MacBreak Weekly and This Week in Photography were the only two that had nothing to do with K-12 education. The MacBreak Weekly podcast seemed to be the largest podcast. They had many sponsors and sounded more like a morning talk show. There was tons of jokes and banter. This Week in Photography also had tons of sponsors. It reminded me more of the initial podcast that I listened to.

Although I am still not exactly sure how podcasting is done, I can see how this would be a wonderful tool for teaching. I really liked the ideas from KidCast and would be interested in how to create a podcast so that I can utilize it in my classroom. Podcasts would be a great way to communicate with parents, too. In addition to the a weekly letter I think a weekly podcast would be wonderful. Also, the amount of continuing education that a teacher can get out of sharing with one another is simply astronomical! I will continue to search through the itune podcasts to see what else I can learn about.