Thoughts on integrating podcasts in my teaching

I can use podcasts in my teaching in a variety of ways. I could use them as an extension of my classes, providing additional material to my students who would like to learn more about the subject. My current experience using podcasts has been to teach internationally via the Web. I have received feedback from Liberia and the Philippines where educational material is hard to come by. I am sure others have heard my podcasts in other nations according to the Web statistics on my server. I produced one podcast a week for about a year. I built my own podcasting automation Website to make the weekly production easier. Now there are social Web applications prebuilt so teachers do not have to build their own.

My grade level is college age adults or high school seniors and my topic is leadership. As leaders, we must be able to clearly communicate our vision to our team, organization, or group. Podcasts could be one method of communicating and teaching others with “reach back” capabilities.

For my hybrid or online courses, I could use podcasts to keep the human element of teaching in the course. I could record the introduction of each lesson and set the tone of the research they would be doing. I could podcast special instructions to projects so students would not be limited to reading everything themselves as in many online courses.

For presentations, I could have the students create podcasts of their presentation and present it on the Web. Students could write responses to each peer podcast. Another option would be to have students’ podcast their responses to readings and research. They could be given the freedom to create dialogue podcasts where they could take opposing viewpoints and create a single cast. This would require the students to meet somewhere to record the podcast.

Just from my brief research on the podcasts offered on the Apple iTunes store. There is a great need for good and consistent podcast for Educational Technology and Education in general. Many of the podcasts are from 2008 and others are just poor quality, desktop publishing. We as teachers can raise the bar. We know what “professional” looks and sounds like. We need to pay attention to the details and invest five more minutes into our production; our students will know the difference.