Lesson 10 Reading Response

There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education


After reading this article, thoughts of the numerous ways in which podcast could be used in the classroom were excitingly, jumping around my brain: Students who were to shy to present in class, could record their podcasts, lessons could be enhanced through the listening of various podcast, assignment instructions could be added to blogs.

At first, the article made it sound like creating a pod cast was not too time consuming or difficult. However, as I read on and the author wrote about bit depths, digital sampling rates etc started to worry me. As the article continues, it talks about the difficulty of producing the podcast. This does not sound like an easy task.

The only way to find out was to try. I decided to record a pod cast about an upcoming project assignment my students needed to complete. With a script in mind, I attempted to record my podcast. After all the creation of the podcast is the easy part- correct? Not for me. I sat down at the computer, ready to record. Things did not go as smoothly as possible. My problems revolved around many different items: mike set up, sound quality, program problems etc. I kept reminding my self, that all it usually takes me hours to complete and “Evidence of Learning” post, but in the end I am triumphant. This help true for the recording of the podcast as well. It did get recorded.

Now that my podcast was recorded, I needed to post it somewhere. I decided to use the website Podomatic for this assignment. I set up my account and then worked on downloading and producing the podcast. Since I do not own an MP3 player, this was all new to me. I have not ever downloaded a song. This was not as painful of a task as I had thought and I was successful!!! After a three day attempt, not only had I created and produced a pod cast, it was also posted on the web.



The article “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education” was the convincing factor for me to create the podcast. As mentioned above, I see this as a valuable tool in the classroom. It will help to make lessons and student work more engaging. However, I did not agree with the entire article. It begins with a descriptive account of a student getting ready for school and listening to various podcast provided by professors. While this situation may work in a University setting, it is not appropriate for all high school settings. If this was the case, why would we need building that house classrooms and teachers. One of the most rewarding parts of teaching, is the personal connections that are made with students. This connections are created by the face to face and day to day work that is accomplished in the classroom.

This being said, podcast will become apart of the lessons that I teach. Like all aspects of teaching, variety is important and one does not use one type of teaching style. I cannot wait to hear my students reaction when they hear my voice on the blog!!!!