How To Use Podcasting In The Classroom
The technological landscape is evolving so fast that most of us programmers have to continually learn, or risk having an increasingly extinct set of skills. “A mistake I often see people make is that they don’t hire the staff they need at the outset and choose to figure out a way once the venture kicks off. A new show is always going to generate interest especially if it is coming from a creator people are familiar with,” Penman said.
Over 500,000 podcasts are active with new episodes regularly, and education is one of the top categories. Podcasts made for students are designed to be easily understandable, to make preparing for exams as pain-free as possible. Revise - A Level English Lit Revision is hosted by students for students, and Mr Allsop History was created by a teacher specifically for GCSE modern history courses.
Some faculty find that a three-to-five minute audio clip is an optimum podcast length, similar to the length of a song students listen to on the radio . Because microlectures are limited in the amount of content they can convey, students are required to complete their learning with additional readings and assignments. After you’ve finished creating, editing, and hosting your podcast, you can submit to podcasting directories like iTunes and Spotify. Here’s what’s involved in sharing your audio files to these directories.
A student can review previous lessons on the way to class; a commuter can use her travel time to catch up with the week's industry news; a jogger can listen to an audiobook. Podcasts can be played back repeatedly, listened to in full or scanned for key details. Armbrecht reports that in a French literature class, students created ten-minute video podcasts that reviewed a French film. They played the role of commentators on a film, developed a script, and illustrated their analysis through film clips. Through this assignment, students developed their spoken and written academic French, as well as strengthened their analytical and technical skills. The goal was to get students engaged in big-picture engineering questions, as the big-picture thinking normally does not occur until the final year of an engineering curriculum.
Think about your publishing schedule before you purchase podcast hosting. If each episode is an hour long, every episode’s file might be around 50mb, which means you’ll likely require over 200mb per month. Generally, it’s wise to pay a little more for the option that gives you a little more space than you require, just in case. If you’re wondering how to start a podcast, your first step will need to be deciding what you’re actually going to discuss on the episode. If you’re looking for a powerful audio editing tool with all the bells and whistles, look no further than Adobe Audition.
Based in the Midwest, Shelley Frost has been writing parenting and education articles since 2007. Her experience comes from teaching, tutoring and managing educational after school programs. Frost worked in insurance and software testing before becoming a writer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in elementary PCS TV education with a reading endorsement. For this you will need a microphone and an audio recording tool.
After consulting with the instructor on the proposal, students produced their own PSAs, complete with background music and other ambient sounds. The PSAs were then submitted to the entire class for studio critique. Afterwards, the PSAs were re-edited and shared with the other students via a class blog. People seek out ease of listening and convenience while opting in for a podcast experience.
Student-created podcasts for course assignments may range from the creation of public service announcements and movie reviews to engineering projects and impacts. Podcasts have demonstrated a use and purpose in higher education that is innovative and effective. While you can listen to episodes via a web browser, most people listen using a dedicated podcast app on their smartphone. In recent years, I have found that all students have access to a cell phone and are able to use an already-installed podcast app, or download one to use to listen to a podcast during class.
It is very important to ensure that podcasts are created in a format that can be played on all mp3 players and not just on iPods. Although podcasts can easily be made available through iTunes, iTunes shares files in a format not accessible to all computers and mp3 players. As a noun it refers to the file that is downloaded or streamed; as a verb it refers to the process or method of delivering the file.