How Can Podcasting Enhance Teaching

I’ve been waiting to send this link out for about a month now, I wanted to research it a bit before doing so: Globalizing Education One Podcast at a Time, by Randy Yerrick, talks about how digital media can reach diverse learners and complement instruction.

It has also emerged as a venue for bridging access gaps, supplementing instruction, and applying multimodality teaching practices to inclusive classrooms—particularly for capturing and disseminating best practices, as well as capitalizing on resources in web and distance education contexts.

Specifically talking about science teaching in a classroom setting, these next bullets are taken directly from the section where he states that podcasting can enhance teaching by:

• Bringing science experts and other resources to teachers and students;
• Providing opportunities to replay significant scientific events and instruction;
• Sharing data and data analysis anywhere and at any time;
• Giving every student virtual access to pristine research facilities and state-of-the-art science demonstrations and simulations;
• Facilitating supplemental instruction through multiple languages;
• Extending the everyday classroom lab experience beyond the classroom walls, and promoting science equity by giving this access to every student; and
• Sharing science teaching artifacts and events for the assessment of excellence in science teaching and learning.

Yes! That’s a great list. I wish I had written it. There are a few more bullets I’d like to add to it from the other side of the podcast:

• Giving students the opportunity to share and document thier findings on a specific subject
• Enabling the students to learn from other students who have excelled and can lead by example

… and… one that I’ve recently done a lot of thinking about in the case of a higher education setting…

• allowing class time to be for interaction

At a college or university, imagine the implications of a class having no book or reading material that went along with it, but instead, the professor released a podcast of a lecture the week before each actual class time. That podcast would be ‘required listening,’ so that when students came to class, the time would not be taken up with lecture time, but with discussion and debate. Hmmm?

Read there rest of the arcticle here: Globalizing Education One Podcast at a Time, by Randy Yerrick.