Reflections on Podcasting.

I can imagine that trying to create podcasts in a classroom would cause great amounts of stress among students and the potential for technology difficulties is great. My computer, for example, has an internal microphone, but the recording quality is fairly poor. Hence, my podcast sounds rather echo-y. I also had some technical difficulties in trying to upload the sound file, but that's to be expected the first time I try it. With students I would now be able to answer some of the questions because I've been through this once now.

Uses in the classroom:

I've discussed in other places some of the different uses to which I could put podcasting, including poetry projects and "This I Believe" essays, but I have since thought of a few more. First, students in my Composition class write an ethnography and are required to conduct at least two interviews. I ask students to turn in written copies of their field notes on observations, but have not found a good way to check on their interviews in the past. This would help with that problem. Additionally, if I were to make some of these interviews available to the full class, they would serve as effective examples. We practice interviewing skills in the class, but it's still something that makes the students very nervous the first time they have to do it.

I've tried to use hand-held recorders to capture literature circle discussions in the past, but the problem with that is I don't have enough digital recorders for every group and I'm unlikely to check them out to a group for use outside of school. Skype would provide a good solution for that. I like to allow lit circles the freedom to meet outside of class, but it does make evaluating their discussions more difficult. I've been searching for a couple of years for a solution to this problem. I'm delighted that Skype has possibly given it to me.

I am also looking forward to trying to give students audio feedback on their writing. Typically reading their work does not take long, but writing constructive criticism is very time-consuming. In an ideal world, I would have time to sit down and conference with each one of my students on their work. Realistically, however, this can't happen. There is simply not enough time in the day. Providing audio feedback that they can access another way (without me being there) would help to solve this problem.

There are a lot of students who would love the opportunity to use these tools for class projects. They always enjoy playing with GarageBand, but have never seriously considered using it for an English project. On the flip side of this, the use of technology beyond word-processing freaks out a surprising number of my students. Even in upper-level courses, there are many, many techno-phobes. This surprises me every time; typically in high schools the teacher is much less technology savvy than students, but there are many who are downright resistant to using new tools. Even something as simple as commenting on a wiki or blog seems to be too much. I haven't found a great way to solve this problem, but I do try to introduce technology in small, useful chunks. We'll use a wiki for a project one week, and then I'll add another component the next week. The students who chose to create their own wikis for the Personal Newsletter projects have become my best advocates for this--after figuring out the technology, they've determined how useful it can be for them, how much time it can save them, and how flexible it can be when they create their own projects. Hopefully, their positive attitudes will continue to positively influence the other students into conquering their fears.