Podcasting - Getting Students Involved
The possible uses of podcasts for teachers and students are so numerous that the real challenge is to pick some of the best uses and find time to try them out.
The quality and variety of podcasts available allows teachers to use them directly as a classroom resource. Directories such as Podcast.net and Podcastalley make it easy to subscribe to media dealing with accordians, zapatistas and everything in between. The iTunes Music Store is easy to search through and has the added advantage of syncing all of your material with an iPod. The ability to take you material with you and play it through speakers or a TV can lower the barriers to classroom usage.
Two examples of great podcasts for students include Discovery Channel and National Geographic video shorts (great discussion starters with students). For teachers, a very interesting CBC podcast is Search Engine. They manage to deal with pertinent issues week after week.
I have been discussing the use of audio books with a Grade 5 teacher. She is trying to find ways to help struggling readers to have a better experience with books that will challenge them thematically. We haven't yet worked out a way to make this convenient for the students. Ideally, they would have an mp3 player to take and use in a cozy spot. Perhaps it's time to start asking for iPod cast offs. In any case, to go deeper and really target learning styles will remain a percolating idea for now.
As with many Web 2.0 technologies, the most effective use of podcasting is to enable students to create strong content themselves. There are great tips and techniques described by my classmates in their recent posts. Ronda mentioned some intriguing possibilities such as creating a tourism guide podcast. There are a group of Grade 6 students at my school who have extended a class assignment to create a wonderful play. Their goal is to record it complete with sound effects and post it. Not worrying about the visuals can allow us to really concentrate on the effectiveness of voice and sound. A teacher in my district has her students record a short podcast at the end of every day. Kind of their news of the day, done from the perspective of the class pet (a hamster?).
It seems that at this point at our school, the most natural use of podcasts is to celebrate good work and motivate students by providing a fresh way to share their results.
Finally, there are a couple of ways that I think the process of podcasting can be made simpler.
- If a teacher really plans to get into podcasting, they should consider using a folder of their own to place the podcasts and feed in. Almost all internet providers supply such a folder. Services such as Blogger will allow you to place your blog on an external site. It seems far simpler to get things happening this way, as far as I can tell.
- If you have a group of students who want to get into audio podcasting, try checking out the Tumblr Site. I stumbled onto it when reading an article on micro-blogging. Tumblr is amazingly clear and clean and easy to use. Posting an audio file is shockingly easy. There are some limitations and the handling of video podcasts is not as elegant. But there is a ton of promise here.
It has been very fun exploring podcasting and reading all of the rich posts. It has gotten to the point where the EDES 545 blogs have become a strong resource for any TLs to check out.
View Podcast? ID = 274420659
I've always wondered how the whole podcast subscription process works. RSS feeds themselves remain a bit of a mystery. Having enjoyed podcasts from Elizabeth, Ronda and Arlene, I decided to jump in and find out more. As Arlene noted, audio podcasts give us a wonderful chance to listen.
Sidenote - There is much to say about listening. Years ago, I read some research on how accurately information is remembered through different media. Retention of spoken information is generally better than something like a TV program, while printed material can be recalled with the most detail of all. Mileage will vary. I experimented with myself and found that information from TV documentaries got garbled in my mind far more quickly than from radio or newspapers. For this reason, I kind of hope that audio podcasts gain wide usage.
Still, some of the things that I wanted to post were quite hard to describe and so I ended up going with a video podcast format. In Apple's ecosystem, you would tend to edit footage with iMovie and bring it into Garageband to add music, voice-overs and sound effects (
Image 1). This is what I did. On a PC, I suppose I would use MovieMaker. The great thing about Garageband is that it can export an audio or video podcast that will play on a computer, an mp3 player or a TV. The default settings seemed to work and I uploaded it to my Internet Provider.
The next step involved creating an RSS feed. Initially, I tried using some tools on the Web such as Feedburner. I wasn't having much luck. I ended up using an actual program called Feeder (
Images 2 and 3). It is pretty cool. I began to see how you can add a title, images, tags and a description in an RSS file. Feeder put a lovely feed into the folder that I had placed my podcast in.
As an iPod user, I depend a lot (too much?) on iTunes for the syncing of my music, books and podcasts. That's where I headed to present my podcast to the world. Before telling the iTunes Music Store about a podcast, it is strongly recommended that it be tested from the user's computer. The iTunes program has an option to do this (
Image 4). It worked nicely. I now had 1 subscriber, me.
At this point, things were working well enough to tell iTMS about my feed. I gave the store the location of my feed (
Image 5) and waited. A day later, the iTunes Store Team gave me the thumbs up (
Image 6). I actually doubt that 'the team' is a real person and I bet they would approve a podcast of me watching paint dry. Still, I felt strangely validated.
They gave me a rather convoluted link that tells iTunes to subscribe me to the podcast. It works (
Image 7). If you use iTunes as your music player,
try it here. Happily, the podcast syncs up beautifully with my iPod. I can kind of imagine students taking advantage of this.
Lots to puzzle over. How long does it take the iTMS to notice that a new episode has been created? Are audio podcasts far quicker to download with slower connections? What about Zune users? Are their feeds completely different? Are there times when it's best to embed media right in the Web page?
I have embedded the podcast as a Quicktime movie right in this post if iTunes is not your music software.
Oh iPod, How Do I Love Thee?
A couple of years ago, I got a lovely black and red U2 iPod as a gift. I was quite taken with it, but wasn’t sure how it would impact my music experience. As online media has matured and the players themselves have grown more powerful, our household has become increasingly reliant on audio and video that can be bought (commercial free, yeah!) and moved around easily.
Portable digital media allows for things like:
- listening to great audio books on long prairie drives
- finding common musical tastes through customer music reviews and ‘listeners also bought’ links
- following very high quality podcasts of book and film reviews, radio programs and technology happenings
- watching a TV program when it is convenient for us (although this is just getting rolling in Canada)
The key advantages of podcasts are that they give the user more control, often have a quality rivaling that of radio / TV, are well tagged and cover a large variety of topics. The RSS format allows someone to subscribe to a podcast series, so that new episodes download in the background and automatically sync up with their mp3 player.
There are some great podcast directories on the Web. I tend to gravitate to the iTunes music store. It syncs all downloaded material with my iPod. Unwatched episodes are marked with a blue dot. iTMS is quite comprehensive, easily searched and well laid out. The podcast area can be browsed in pictorial or column view.
Video podcasts make up a larger proportion of material available all the time. Some topics seem to need a little more visual support. I hope that audio podcasts remain strongly represented. It is a great chance for young people to experience a form of radio, where their imaginations are fully engaged in filling in the pictures. For those podcasts that include video, the user's iPod can be hooked up directly to the TV to easily share with family or students. It is a strange experience to have full blown video streaming off of a tiny little iPod to a big television set.
A Closer Look at Tagging
Having read the recent posts of my classmates on social bookmarking, I wanted to look more closely at the process of tagging content.
One of the most illuminating articles I have seen was
Social Bookmarking Tools (I) A General Review (Hammond, et all). It begins by reviewing the development of links and of shared taxonomy’s such as Yahoo’s directory. Structures such as these have been moved out of the lime light as search engines have become more useful.
As the article moves on to users tagging the content of others, it mentions one of the most compelling features of a Web 2.0 service. The more social bookmarking sites are used, the more value they accrue. The challenges to evolving a robust set of tagged links are many:
Tags are free form labels. There is no controlled vocabulary. I got snagged with this issue right away when I was tagging my modest set of links. I had been using the tag bridges but later switched to bridge. Sure enough, each tag brought up a different set of links. Ouch.
Tags also produce a flat namespace. Unlike a regular taxonomy, there is no real hierarchy to a set of tagged data. We tend to rely more on an intuitive approach to finding the right thing. I kind of like this, but you never feel like you’re being at all exhaustive.
Some structure can be introduced to tags. Del.icio.us allows you to bundle your tags. I have found it helpful to use a handful of bundle categories to help things feel less loose. There are no formal rules for bundling at this point. It is up to the individual how to tag their tags.
Right now, there is a strong English presence in the tags used on some Web 2.0 systems. But incorporating multiple languages into a freeform structure will be tricky.
Up to this point, tag spamming hasn’t been an issue. The authors recommend that we all remain diligent as tagging becomes a more mainstream way to look for things.
Looking ahead,
some great suggestions are made by Lars Pind on improving the practice of tagging:
Perhaps a site such as Del.icio.us could suggest tags for us, and expose us to the global set of existing tags.
It would be very useful for synonyms to be given to compliment our tags.
A hierarchy could be inferred from the way tags are used. A site may be able to figure out that beef and pork seem to be tags one level below the meat tag.
A couple of other general comments on social bookmarking should be made.
As a teacher, I am intrigued by the power of sharing links amoung students and having them tap into the use of tags. The challenge in working with Elementary students is that the user interfaces are highly textual and busy. If I were to include an experience with social bookmarking in a project, I would certainly start with our Grade 6s. I have a sense that the process of using tags and adding tags to their own links would be a great way to generate some higher mental activity and some good discussion. Could we get some sharing of bookmarks happening between schools? Time to talk with my colleagues.
I am very happy with the quality of content that I have seen Del.icio.us users link to. In my searching for Grade 3 science content, most of the sites that came up were very useable and unique. I had never seen about half of them before. I get a sense that the user base acting as a filter works well.
The portability of the bookmarks is a real plus. Adding bookmarks to my Del.icio.us account is so easy. I have already used it to grab some links that I found on a laptop in the mountains this weekend. Our school already uses a web site to organize pre-selected links. I’m not sure if we’re ready to leave that tool behind, but I do have lots to think about.
I'm Your Fan
As teachers move through a school year, the Web content that they refer to can change considerably. I have partly been rescued by tabbed browsing, which allows for the grouping and ordering of loads of bookmarks.
Still, it can be a hassle to sync tabs among different computers and users. Enter social bookmarking. As explained in the article
7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (Educause), SB is “the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and tagging them with keywords”. This can allow us to make our sites searchable by our own categories. Sharing them with others becomes a matter of granting access.
Social bookmarking goes quite far beyond posting our own favorite sites. On Del.icio.us, I can search the site for bookmarks by keyword. I can then try those sites out, look at who posted each of them, and see all of their public bookmarks. If I like what they’ve got, I can add them to my network and become their fan. My network is rather modest right now. Still, these 4 users have hundreds of links. Johntron alone has 453 favorites. Inconceivable!
It is a bit disorienting at first. I would like to know more about Johntron. Does he have a profile somewhere? Also, I am sure that there is a way to group my bookmarks, but haven’t stumbled across it yet.
One of the coolest things I have noticed is the cloud view of tags. When looking at a collection of bookmarks, you can see the tags that users have applied. The cloud view shows you all of the tags in a box with the most common tags printed larger. Clicking on a tag filters everything and shows the sites that contain it.
The 7 Things article mentions that when a group of users tags resources to give them some structure, it is called a folksonomy. The possible downside of using a folksonomy is that it is only as good as its tags. The Del.icio.us site seems quite usable so far.
Broadcast Yourself
As our attention moves from photo sharing to video sharing, I thought I should try to get a handle on what exactly YouTube was offering.
I started off with the 4 main areas of the site:
Home - Includes videos being watched, promoted videos and featured videos. Video rankings and view hits seem to have no correlation to the quality of the video.
Videos - Acts a bit like a directory with various categories. These categories can really help you find your way around.
Channels - The non-profit channel has some interesting content. You Choose ’08 is focusing on the U.S. Primary race. Many of the so-called Musicians, Comedians, Directors and Gurus are hosting channels that are a bit weak.
Communities - Contains Groups and Contests. I think that you kind of have to jump into a group to understand what it's about.
My overall thoughts on the service are difficult to summarize. It's hard to get a feel for YouTube, since evaluating a video requires you to actually watch the video. As Jess mentioned in her
Before I Begin... post, video is a strange beast. It can be very powerful, but the viewer has to agree to buy into the time and energy needed to watch a clip. Otherwise, it can be frustrating.
The quality of YouTube content is very uneven, with lots of self-indulgent pieces. LOTS. While searching, I tried including the words
not crap, but it seemed to make things worse. Still, I am glad that the service exists. I have to take it for what it is. When people are invited to broadcast themselves, that’s exactly what they will do.
There is much more to think about. How do searches at sites like TeacherTube compare against YouTube for their educational value? Can I get more useful material from the Media Services in my school district? How exactly is YouTube managing the copyright infringement issues (great discussion for secondary students)?
I look forward to finding out the impressions of all of my classmates.
