Blog Post #4

Why Podcasts?
Basically, Podcasts are school lessons on steroids! Podcasts should be used in the classroom because almost one hundred percent of students today are millenials. Millenials are people born after the year 1980, who spend crazy amounts of hours daily on some sort of technology, so why not use technology to educate? Podcasting is a twenty-first century skill that promotes student-centered learning based from Bloom's Taxonomy. The overall goal when podcasting, or anything to do with Bloom's Taxonomy, is to get students to learn through creativity and innovation. Just a few ways that podcasts are able to do this, is allowing students to make presentations in their own voice, or reading information in someone else's voice or character, which makes learning fun. Podcasts are not only for students, but for the teachers disposal as well. For example, if a teacher podcasts every lecture, a home-bound sick student will not miss any classroom information that might be crucial for an upcoming test by watching the podcasts from home.

Langwitches' blog Listening-Comprehension-Podcasting, provides a great example of teaching listening comprehension through Podcasts. They said that in order for a student to learn a new word, they need to see and use that word over seventy times. Podcasts allow the student to see the word's letters, context, and its use in sentences. Not only that, but they create it by themselves! Through creating a Podcast, the student pronounces the word, therefore hearing and seeing it come out of his or her mouth, and then edit their own work.

Judy Scharf's Podcast Collection shared some critical things to remember when using Podcasts in the classroom. For starters, Be comfortable with the software yourself before teaching students how to use it. Give the students topics, allow them to pick their own groups, and allow plenty of time to work,  because lessons will always take longer than planned! Lastly, the students will take great pride in the Podcast they created, so invite the principal or a general audience so the students may display his or her work.