Why educational podcasting

Your views are urgently sought .... please

How's this for a start:

Why Educational Podcasting...?

• Provides another way of sharing and transmitting audio for teaching and learning in schools and at home
• Children and young people are able to record, produce and publish on the Internet podcasts of their very own
• Tailored to any curriculum area
• Can provide bespoke materials to support any learning situation
• Provides instructional content to reinforce learning
• Excellent for homework
• Potential to support or extend the work of any pupil with special needs
• Great community/school link potential
• Useful for children who miss sessions/ illness etc
• Useful for those with a reading difficulty or for English as a second or third language
• Promotes a concept of ownership of materials
• Promotes sustained effort in publishing for specific audiences
• An easy vehicle for personalised learning.

Some Contexts

School weekly magazine

Reports of school visits on line

Development of collections of poetry

Collaborative work with other schools

Audio jargon busters

Information for parents

Information for new pupils

Historical interviews

Regular school sports reports

Summary …Podcasting has the potential to offer the following for personalised learning in schools:

• creating audio material for learning "on demand", at anytime and anywhere
• using differential materials that can be matched to the abilities, needs and motivation of identified children and young people
• engaging in curriculum activities grounded in an emerging technology and integral to the world-wide communication revolution
• providing curriculum-related teaching and learning in a wide range of contexts and in different locations both within and away from school
• As with all technologies, podcasting has the potential for releasing the imagination of children, young people, their teachers and parents/carers.

The thing about podcasting is that for it to work in a classroom context the technical issues have to be none existent and the software that is used has to be transparent, simple, quick and straightforward. So the question here is 'Is your podcasting software fit for purpose?' bearing in mind its use may well be about creating autonomous experiences for children. Anthony Evans, primary ICT consultant in Redbridge says: “if an application is going to take a long time to work out, or if the interface looks unfamiliar [teachers] will leave it to the tech teachers to do.” He continues, “teachers need something easy, something they can switch on and work out quickly”.

In my opinion such a piece of software is Podium from Softease.

You can read more of Anthony's views on the Podium blog.