· What opportunities do you see podcasting being able to offer you in your educational setting?
Generally speaking they offer language learners the chance to practice two essential skills: speaking and listening. The content is flexible as they can create it or they can choose from a wider choice of ready available podcasts to listen to.
I feel there is a multi-strand here and we need to remember the context and learning level, outcomes, styles and resources we have available.
Podcasting can offer:
a) Authentic Listening: learners listen to real-life audio content (created by others) Great new opportunities for listening – very much like a more flexible and menu-selected range of audio files tailored to our learners’ needs
b) Real Audience: learners record their own voices and content. The listeners soon become speakers and can post audio comments in reply to what they hear. New ways of recording voices ( a great improvement on the tape recorder) which allows learners added speaking practice and the possibility of sharing their voice new audience and new levels of interaction with that audience new horizons to suit some learning styles better than text communication
c) Audio-on-the-go: lecturer podcasts to catch up on seminar or lesson you missed, tutorial for so many subjects, homework assignments, more listening practice, mp3 files on lessons or relevant topics to integrate or review material covered in class.
Learners can use their PC to listen to it or download and store this audio content to their portable music players in their own time, as many times as they want. Repetition easy and integral.
As I said in the round table discussion tonight on Podcasting & Language Learning hosted by Scott Lockman and in the YG discussion I have used podcasting with learners mainly as a listening resource. The main reason for this is they are academic university students and we do not have recording facilities. Podcasting also requires a lot of time – practising and repeating “parts”, uploading, editing etc which many short exam courses do not allow.
These new resources are much more than just more listening. They are excellent for exposing to a huge range of accents, speaking styles in a click. They are fun like http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/ and quick to follow. For young learners there are issues with level and appropriacy (see Graham and Joe for more info!)
With one class I even found they were interested in listening to the same podcast in several languages. A lot of government information is now accessible as a podcast. For academic students, who have a command of many languages and are training to be interpreters, translators or whatever this is fantastic. Take the one I did on the environment for example from the EU Climate change site http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/ My students found it great to be able to listen to the other languages they are studying after listening to the English one (at the Oriental University of Naples the students I teach will have English is their second language, an Asian language will be their third and maybe fourth and fifth will be Latvian and Portuguese or some other European mix )
I have also trained teachers to set up podcasts. On a recent face to face project training we developed an idea for a project that will be carried out in the UK with mobile podcasting. The idea is called “Talk a Walk” and it is to record their learners’ trip to London in a new perspective, through sound.
These are some of the ideas we brainstormed: London with difficulty/ London in different shoes/ London through other senses. I think it was pretty neat to allow these students to choose the theme, to work in separate groups and then to help them develop it. This is not always possible, we were lucky that this EU funded projects covers the cost of going to the UK. Lucky for some J I just do the training ;-( So the “through senses podcasts” will be on describing art: wall graffiti to Tate Gallery, or describing the food they see and try. The oral record will be done as a substitute to our travel log scrap books! If the school could get the money for videocasting tools that would be ideal but sometimes just voice with no images makes the dialogues or spoken comments richer and for teachers new to ICT it can be easier – although vlogging is getting very simple.
· How effectively do you think you can engage students with something like a podcast?
· What (if any) problems can you foresee that may result in your podcast project not becoming a success? What can you do to avoid them?
Listen here for my answers (podcasting from Odeo to familiarise myself with it after a long time 😉
http://odeo.com/show/8536743/1060891/download/EVO2007Week4ReflectionsOnPodcasting.mp3
Or try this
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