Educational Podcasts

Kidcast #45 - Building Interview Skills Through Speed Networking

This podcast was created by Dan Schmit. He creates podcasts about how to integrate podcasts into your classroom. This was one of his activities that he thought would be a great way to not only build some skills, but also learn to use a podcast. He took the idea of speed dating from our pop culture world and added a twist - made it into speed networking for students. What they would do is set up in groups of 10, numbered one through five. Two people would be paired and have the same questions to ask the rest of the people in the group. They would take about eight minutes asking and talking to other members in their group. All while this is going on it would be recording. Then at the end, the two students would come together and analyze the answers they got and upload their recordings onto a computer. Then they would edit them and put hm onto a podcast so they could share their findings with everyone else.


Kidcast #46 - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

This podcast was by Dan Schmit again. He introduced an activity that would be used to try and encourage students to look more closely at pictures to describe and generate more detailed and thoughtful narratives. What would happen is each group, or student depending on how you divide the class, would get a photograph. They would then look at and explore the photo and ask 20 questions. Then discussing the photo together, they would generate their answers into a narrative that they would then record and put on a podcast. Then if you add the photo to the podcast, you can zoom in and pull up certain details about the photo to show what the student is talking about. This will build good descriptive narrative skills.


Personally, after just listening to this first podcast, I do not like them. I think they may help benefit some students, but it is hard to listen to and take in what he is saying. Perhaps I am just a more hands on learner. I think they idea he ha of speed networking was better than putting it onto a podcast. It is a good way to pull technology into the classroom, but I think there are better ways. The whole photograph podcast would be more interesting however. I think it would actually work. I think using podcasts in the classroom is a good way to build up to something big at the end of a long unit, by putting it all into a podcast. But I wouldn't use them to teach anything in my classroom.

Podcasts could be used to support literacy instructions in some ways. You could use them to teach students a new strategy or lesson in literacy. You could also use them to have students compile their own work at the end of an unit. When students are writing poems they could read them and upload them onto a podcast. You could also use the idea that Dan Schmit had earlier about using photographs to write narratives.

I would use podcasts in my classroom in these five different ways:

- To teach about using detail in stories
- To read a finished story of a student's or the classes onto a recorder and transform it onto a podcast to share with the community
- Have students practice writing instructions to simple tasks and then record them on podcasts to teach other, younger students perhaps
- Use it to teach an informational section on something they are learning
- I could use them to have my students interview each other so we could all share what we found out about others to get to know everyone better