Week 4- Podcasts

Due to technical difficulties and my voice being a little lost I have not yet had a chance to play with creating a podcast of my own.

I was interested to see that Pod cast stands for Personal On Demand (broad) Casting and was created so that you might download a tv show, film or perhaps radio program to listen to at a later date.

I like the idea of the radio program and being able to create a radio show with the class and then ahving the ability for their parents to listen to what they have been creating in class at home. I remember doing this as part of english myself way back in the X gen day but having to record our voices to tape and use a tape player!!!

So I have been doing some reading. The langwitches blog has an interesting post about his experiences with using this type of technology in the classroom. He states that although students will probaly go home and tell mum and dad "we recorded our voices today" their parents need to understand that by podcasting they developed or improved important skills:

• Collaboration skills : working in groups on different segments of the podcast, tying in and back to a story that was developed by the entire class.
• Writing skills: creative & descriptive writing, sequencing, editing and revising scripts
• Speaking skills: speaking slowly, fluently, clearly and with expression in their voices
• Presentations skills: being able to express themselves orally
• Communication skills: being able to convey and teach information to others (not only in their physical location and presence, but also in virtual time and from places around the world.
• Oral fluency: increase awareness of their voice, speed and its rhythm.
• Auditory skills: practice listening skills, address auditory learning styles
• (Digital) storytelling skills: being able to weave information and facts preciously learned into a creative story, form a “relationship” with the content presented, entertain others through creative narrative.
• Media literacy: different types of podcasts (narrative, informational, storytelling, conversational, collaborative, interview style, etc), understanding different components of a podcast episode, being able to express themselves in different media.
• Information literacy: integrating, expressing and transmitting information in a variety of media.
• Technology skills: exposure to sound editing software, such as Garageband

As I am yet to create my own pod cast I am going to reserve judgement as to whether podcasts actually arean easy tool to use and not going to become a time consuming exerise that is used simply to tick a box on a unit plan that ICT is being intergrated.

I have been seraching for podcasts to share in this and have found a podcast of a poetry reading I used Podomatic to publish it in my account and dowloiaded it to this blog using the HTML code,it loaded quickly so that is promising for future use.
The poem is about "The good old days" before technology!




6 August 2010 I am still trying to create a podcast of my own using audacity but can not seem to hear my voice once it is recorded? I have checked all my volumes and even tried a mic gheadset but my voiuce is still really soft? Back to the drawing board.