Podcasting

Many educators are beginning to realize the advantage or using podcasting in their curriculum. Podcasting involves recording information and then uploading it to the Internet. From there it can be downloaded to digital media players or accessed and listened to directly from a computer. Podcasting gives everyone a chance to create self-published radio type programs.

Podcasts are free, making it a great tool for education! Students and teachers have access to thousands of audio programs and they can also create their own.

More background on podcasting can be found in this Learning in Hand article

During our ctap6 Technology Enhanced Curriculum Project (TEC) we learned how to create and upload podcasts. We were given a small digital recorder, a Creative Zen Nano, which has a microphone built in. We took those to our classrooms and had students make some recordings. We returned to class and learned how to edit those recordings using free software (Audacity for Windows and Garage Band for Mac). We also learned how to create a podcast page in Gcast (also free) and upload our files to iTunes. The process is quite simple!

My podcasting project involved 7th and 8th graders in my Computer Literacy class. The project was based on the worldwide movement to name 7 "New" Wonders of the World. Students visited the website and read about the 21 places nomimated to be one of the New 7 Wonders. Those chose their own seven and created a website highlighting those choices. Part of the assignment was to write a paragraph describing each location and explaining why they thought that site should be one of the New 7 Wonders. Those paragraphs were then recorded on the digital recorder. Since I am the webmaster at our district I was able to post the student websites and the podcasts on our school website. Check them out here!

Blogging

Blogs were originally called Web logs, or weblogs. The two words were later simplified to "blogs." A blog is basically a web spot where information, pictures and links can be posted. Most people refer to them as web journals but they can really be much more than that. What is great about blogs is that they function a lot like a webpage but they are easier to write and publish. They are sort of like chatting because you can respond to what comments other people add but you do not have to be logged on at the same time. Another great thing about blogs is that they are free!

You can find more information regarding the use of blogs in education here.

During our ctap6 Technology Enhanced Curriculum Project (TEC) we learned how to create blogs and we were introduced to many ideas for use in the classroom.There are several web services that offer blogs. The one that we used was edublogs which caters to educational blogging. There even was a blog for our TEC so we could get used to using one!

I had been introduced to the idea of blogs in the classroom last year during one of my classes at Sacramento State. They suggested we use blogger.com. I created a blog for my 8th graders using blogger and you can view it here. Having used both services now, I recommend using edublogs with you students. It seems like a safer place because it can be password protected and students do not need to establish an account. The account process on blogger.com is lengthy and requires that students have an email account and that they create their own personal blog. I plan to create a new class blog using edublog and stop using blogger.com.

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