Blog Post #4

What I have learned about podcast's

The three resources I watched and read were Landwitches "Podcasting with 1st Grade," Landwitches "Flat Stanley Podcast," and "The benefits of podcasting in the classroom" by Joe Dale. Before I watched and read about podcasts, I honestly didn't know what a podcast was and how they could be used in a classroom. This is why I found each of these resources very helpful and informative. In Landwitches "Podcasting with 1st Grade," it begins by saying "if you have not thought of podcasting with your younger elementary students, I encourage you to think again." This opening statement got me thinking why could this person encourage us to think again? As I continued to read, I realized how useful and powerful podcasts can be in classrooms. In this post "Podcasting with 1st Grade," a group of first graders listened to a second grades podcast about animals. The first graders loved it! They were so enthusiastic and eager to record their own voices that they decided to make their own. The idea they used in their podcast was that they were pretending to interview two main characters from the book they were reading. They read one chapter at a time, discussed each chapter, and then the students came up with questions they had for the two main characters, Jack and Annie. Then they started recording their own podcast. What I learned from this that can be useful in my own podcast is it's better to not read straight from a script. I also was unsure how the editing worked when making a podcast, but after this I found that editing is simple and you can put together different segments without having to memorize a lot at one time. I would love to do an activity just like this in my future classroom. It gets the children excited about learning and it teaches them a different set of skills that are important to have in the 21st century.

The second resource I found helpful and informative was Landwitches "Flat Stanley Podcast." In this blog post, I learned that you can have fun and be creative when making a podcast. In this post, a class of first graders read the book "Flat Stanley" by Jim Brown. This group of first graders sent paper Flat Stanleys to relatives and friends around the country and received messages back. In their podcast they each had their own speaking part. They were able to create their own story based off of the book "Flat Stanley." I loved this idea a lot. It was very fun and creative to have the children create a story in which they pretended to be their own flat version of themselves. It was a fun way of teaching the students and it also helped the students gain the skills needed in order to create a podcast. Technology is advancing faster than ever, so teaching students skills like how to create a podcast are relevant and should be taught in classrooms.

The last resource I found helpful and informative was the video and information on "The benefits of podcasting in the classroom" by Joe Dale. In this post the clip begins by decribing what a podcast is. A podcast is "an effective way of interacting with students outside of the traditional classroom." It also "delivers radio-quality instruction and content that can be listened to anytime, anywhere." The clip also described some of the benefits of podcasting in the classroom. I really liked this post because it really focuses on the benefits. Some benefits of podcasting is it promotes creativity and innovation, it can offer distant learning opportunities for absent students, and parents can see and hear what their children are doing at school. Now knowing that podcasts can be used and listened to anywhere and anytime, this makes making a group podcast seem a lot more controlled and do-able.