The World of Podcasting

Up until this session, I'd heard mainly from technology experts, so I wanted to attend a workshop with regular teachers. Betsy Sandstrom, a Russian teacher at TJHSST, and her colleagues Carter Vaden, a German teacher, and Koji Otani, a Japanese teacher, shared their perspective as teachers of the podcast project outlined by students in the opening presentation. Self-described "technovices," they explained how they got over their fear of being less informed than their students.

They obtained a grant that provided money for equipment: digital voice recorders (or in some cases microphones for iPods) for recording, iPods for downloading, MacBook Pros installed with GarageBand for mixing and uploading, and external hard drives for storing. More important, because of the investment in its equipment, Apple coordinated training of teachers (and students, if they wanted it), including on GarageBand at the local Apple store. As you might imagine, companies have a vested interest in getting users to understand their programs. So if you ask for training, they're usually happy to give it to you, so you'll continue using their products. The same would go for PC products like Audacity and Windows Movie Maker, I'm sure. Besides, it never hurts to ask.

Since the equipment is all Mac, I'm not going to go into the technical details of how the students created and uploaded podcasts to iTunes. But the fact is, from these teachers' perspective, the technical aspect wasn't the point. The objectives of the activity focused on proper vocabulary and grammar use in scripting and proper pronunciation in dialogue, so the rubric reflected that. Success (or lack thereof) in posting a podcast was not part of a student's grade. To these teachers, grading the technical steps would be like grading handwriting on an essay: It's only the mode of expression, not the purpose, so it shouldn't be assessed. Still, the real-world application for their work motivated students to complete the project, even without being graded on the final product.

Basically, these teachers went into the project expecting their students to be able to figure out the intracies of the technology, just like most teachers would expect that a student could figure out how to use a pencil. Sure, some students weren't be as tech-savvy, but by working in groups, students could find their own strengths in completing the project.

But, they said, even if you don't think your students are ready to make podcasts themselves, they should be considered more often as a teaching tool. After all, there's a specific section for podcasts on iTunes. And other sites, such as Podcast Alley, are devoted solely to podcasts. Podcasts tap on all four of the basic modes of communication: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Imagine this project: Students listen to a podcast from NPR News, so they can speak about the issues presented in a class discussion, then they read related material from a textbook, so they can write a response to the ideas presented, which they can actually publish on the NPR podcast site. Basically, podcasts work like any other text, but students often are more engaged by them. And once they're engaged, they like to experiment with the technology themselves. You see where I'm going with this, right? Students finally have the opportunity to be the creators of the same kind of material that they study in the classroom. If that doesn't instill the responsibility of being citizen rhetors, I don't know what does.