Podcasting
One of my personal aims at this conference is to learn more about podcasting, as we plan to start using this technology at our department. Luckily, there are quite a few presentations on this topic. At the moment, I’m attending one by Hegelheimer and O’Bryan dealing with how to use podcasts for listening exercises. Some advantages of podcasting in their view are seamless integration, mobility and flexibility.
I would be very interested to get more tips from those already using podcasting in their teaching: Do you go for audio only, or do you complement with images or even video? Have you tried using podcasting for exercises where students, not teachers, are producers, focusing on oral production rather than listening?
I would be very interested to get more tips from those already using podcasting in their teaching: Do you go for audio only, or do you complement with images or even video? Have you tried using podcasting for exercises where students, not teachers, are producers, focusing on oral production rather than listening?
posted by Therese at 4:22 pm
4 Comments:
I have the impression that in the UK more interesting work is being done with podcasts in the secondary school sector rather than the higher education sector.
Two examples:
1. Look at Joe Dale's blog site.
Joe teaches in a middle school and has done a lot of work using podcasts with schoolchildren. His site is entitled "Integrating ICT into the Modern Foreign Languages Classroom" at http://joedale.typepad.com
This site covers a variety of topics relating to the teaching of foreign languages, especially blogging, podcasting and using interactive whiteboards. See also Joe Dale's ICT blog at the Times Educational Supplement website: http://www.tes.co.uk/blogs/
2. Ewan McIntosh and Mark Pentleton are two key names in this area. Both work in Scotland. Look especially at the Partners in Excellence (PiE) site, part of a Scottish initiative for the promotion of language learning and teaching using ICT. PiE are creating their own series of podcasts for languages learners, which they refer to as PiECasts: http://www.pie.org.uk
Thanks Graham! Strange that there aren't more examples from tertiary level - I can see many appropriate uses here as well. Thanks for you examples as well!
The problem with new technological developments is that people get over-excited about the technology rather than thinking seriously about ways in which they can exploit it. If you look at Joe Dale’s blog, to which I referred in my previous posting, he describes Duke University’s experiment with podcasting – which Ewan McIntosh describes, in a comment in the blog, as a “failure”. I replied thus:
It comes as no surprise to me that simply making podcasts available to language students is not effective per se. Thinking back to my days as a language centre director, we had a similar experience when satellite TV first became available. “Wow! What a great resource!” we thought. But students, left to their own devices, did not get a lot out of watching TV. So we introduced generic worksheets into the satellite TV viewing room. We had one for recordings of news broadcasts. It was just one sheet of A4, which the students filled in and handed in to language centre staff. On the sheet were a few simple tasks, such as:
1. Write down the headlines of the main news items that you viewed in the broadcast.
2. Write down 10 new words or phrases that you learned. (Students usually borrowed a dictionary from the language centre at the same time as they borrowed the video recording, so they could look up new words and phrases.)
3. Write down a summary of the news item that interested you most and why.
The worksheets were not marked by language teaching staff. They were mainly intended to be a means of focusing students’ attention, but teaching staff would pick completed worksheets at random and offer feedback to students. This resulted in a marked improvement in the way students used satellite TV recordings. Our local comprehensive school has adopted a similar strategy. Students file the completed worksheets in a portfolio which their teachers can view at any time. It's highly motivating!
Podcasts are clever technology, but in the end they are just recorded materials and, like any other recorder materials, their usefulness hinges on (1) the quality of their content and (2) what you do with them. In the secondary education sector in the UK some teachers have found that getting learners to produce their own podcasts is more useful than getting them to listen (or view) ready-made materials.
An afterthought - and a couple of questions that I have also posted in the conference wiki for consideration in the panel discussion:
Many lecturers are now making their lectures available as podcasts. It has often been argued that the lecture is a very inefficient way of transmitting knowledge - although many people would argue the opposite view. What are the pros and cons of a lecture transmitted via a podcast compared to one delivered to a live audience? As one lecturer put it: "I delivered lectures on German literature for more than 20 years, working from the same basic sets of notes, updated as necessary, but I never gave the same lecture twice. The reactions of the audience told me how to to deliver the lecture. Puzzled looks indicated that I wasn't getting the message across and, of course, students would ask questions from time to time that made me change track."
Is podcasting an example of “disruptive technology”? See reference below, bearing in mind that “disruptive” in this context has a special and not necessarily negative meaning.
Godwin-Jones R. (2005) "Skype and podcasting: disruptive technologies for language learning", Language Learning & Technology 9, 3: 9-12. Available at: http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num3/emerging/default.html
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