As more and more technological tools being introduced into classrooms, podcasting, a widely used tool has taken education by storm, and the technology cannot be ignored. According to Wikipedia, a podcast is “a web feed of audio files that is placed on the Internet for anyone to download.
Why do teachers use podcasts? First of all, podcasting is cheap. A microphone is the only piece of required hardware. Second of all, podcasting could pull teachers or anyone who uses computer from all over the world together, so people may exchange perspectives and share experiences. Also podcasting can be interactive. Take one podcast episode I watched and would love to use in my teaching in the future as an example --- “Can I take a message?” This episode is very interactive since students could answer questions in relation to the information provided from the episode, and at the same time they can have the flexibility to choose when to respond the questions. Just like mentioned above, I would love to use the example episode in my ESL teaching, so I could ask students to practice listening, speaking, writing etc. with the podcast. I wonder if the episode could be a video which has images in it, which would enhance student’s learning greatly.
Perhaps after practicing with that podcast, you could have your students create a vidcast or video clip.
ReplyDeleteDr. Burgos