Podcasts in Education: Making Education Portable

After reviewing a fair amount of information on Podcasting the following ideas seem to come to light:

1. Podcasts have a few benefits in education, the first of which is portability. Podcasting will allow students to view lessons, and supporting materials outside of the classroom. While this may seem promising to us as educators, is it realistic to expect a student to watch a lesson outside of class? This is especially true for students who are not completely interested in the curriculum. Another potential benefit may come from the fact that Podcasts are multimedia based. This may peak student interest because it is in an electronic format, but will their interest decline after the “newness” wears off?
2. As always, there are negatives to balance the positives. Podcasting is no exception. Educators wishing to produce their own Podcasts need to have access to some form of digital media equipment (camera, camcorder, etc.), a microphone, and a computer with internet access and any audio and video editing software. These items may not be readily available to all educators, and even if they are, they may not be savvy enough to use them to produce a quality product that will capture, and retain the students’ interest. Another potential downside relates to the availability of technology with regard to the students. Students who do not have an iPod or MP3 player loose the “portability” of the Podcast. Even if they have a portable device, they may not have sufficient bandwidth to download the Podcast efficiently. Finally, if students have hearing imparements, the audio portion of a Podcast may offer little value, especially if it is not attached to a video of someone talking (so the student could possibly read their lips). Of course, we may not have hearing impared students in our class everyday, but the occassion may present itself when we do have a hearing impared student (I can speak from experience), and we have to take our means of presenting information into consideration.

For more information on the benefits and disadvantages of Podcasting view “7 Things You Should Know About Podacsting” at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7003.pdf.

After weighing the advantages and disadvantages of Podcasting I don’t envision incorporating them into my curriculum on a regular basis. They seem labor intensive to produce, especially if they are of high quality, and commercially prepared Podcasts relating to my curriculum are few and far between.

On another note, I must say that in the past two weeks of class I feel I have gained a great deal of insight into what web based educational tools are available, and may have applications in my class. Granted, there are some concepts that still evade me, such as “why use a word processing tool on-line, when Word works perfectly well?” I understand the idea of collaborative editing and publishing, but that can be done on a wiki. Once again, my insight, or lack there of, may be due to my own area of study. I would imagine that someone else might feel that they are a great asset. That being said, today’s class was a real ”eye opener”. I never realized there were so many web 2.0 tools out there. Well, to be completely honest, I never even thought about it. The number of web 2.0 applications is staggering. Finding the ones that have an application in my program will be more of a challenge, especially since I’m not in a “traditional” academic/classroom setting. It seems like the is an almost endless amount of web 2.0 tools for personal use, such as entertainment, selecting a name for a baby, or planning a vacation. Applications that are more fitting for the educational environment seem somewhat more limited, not by quantity, but by type. For example there were several blogging and wiki sites listed in our resources. They all seem to boil down to pretty much the same thing with different ”bells and whistles”. One can get lost trying to navigate through them all. This idea relates to Joe Paterno’s quote from the Big Ten media day: “After you catch 3 (fish) they all look the same.” This was proven today as I tried to sift through all of the resources looking for ones that were educationally useful. I’m sure there are several other web 2.0 resources and applications out there that I am not aware of. Some, such as blogging, hold a great deal of promise for education, while others seem almost worthless to me.