Exploring Podcasting and Blogging

Podcasting and vlogging has been happening in my classroom for approximately five weeks. We spent several weeks in the mode of experimentation and software learning, and have had three weeks of production, during which time kids in my class have had to produce three episodes.

Have they learned in this time what podcasting is all about? Should we be continuing, or should we move on? This is always the question that teachers are asking themselves, but in many ways, it comes directly back to what we believe educational spaces are for, and about the value of what happens in our classrooms.

When we move on, when we leave a project or a concept behind, we do so because we believe that kids have mastered, to the greatest degree possible, whatever it is that we are wanting to teach them. We can't obviously do everything at one time so we need to move through content using multiple forms of representation, allowing kids time and effort to acquire the expertise of showcasing their knowledge and understanding in various ways.

So how does blogging and podcasting fit into this idea? Blogging truly doesn't. Blogs are a reflective space where kids work through their knowledge in ways that are almost always formative. Blogs are spaces where kids write, think, re - write, and re - think. Their ideas are undergoing constant redevelopment in this space and as educators, our role is to support and empower their understanding, and their (hopefully), increasingly deepened understanding of what they are doing. Without this growth, blogs simply turn into online journals. So blogging is not a space or a form of representation that can ever be mastered. A students can never reap all of the benefits possible from blogging. The next post may always bring new insight from someone you have never heard from before. Blogging needs to be an always ongoing process.

Podcasts are different. First of all, podcasting is not about the conversation like blogging is. Certainly we see instances of a podcast starting a debate, other people chiming in with their opinions either on blogs or on podcasts of their own, and the debate continuing; but podcasts, like we are recording them anyway, are a stand - along work. My students have made podcasts on entertainment, book reviews, the latest movies, health and exercise, etc. These pieces can certainly be listened to and commented on both for audio quality and for the quality of the recorded content, but they are far less a conversation then our blogs are.

But after five weeks are we finished with podcasting?

I hope not. We have learned a great amount about the power of the classroom as a studio and about the exponential learning that is possible in a network. We have explored this new medium, but we are in no way masters of it. We are beginning to understand the possibilities of genre, but we have certainly only touched upon this. These students are seeing the purpose of research, of production, scheduling, and time management. Not to mention some of them seeing the power of revision, of editing, of doing something repeatedly until it is done to their satisfaction.

Some of them are of course not there yet. I had kids long after school last Thursday finishing up something that should have been completed earlier in the week as they did not manage their time well or see the need to complete the research earlier that would have made their recording process go more smoothly. But they cared enough to stay for over an hour after school to get it finished. It was worth their time and that is an important sign to me.

This week we are on spring break, but when we return, I hope to move right back to where we left off.

technorati tags: podcasting, blogging, classroom

Comments

[Barbara]

Yes, some employers are looking for forward thinking educators like yourself. I for one am doing just that as I start to accept resumes. whoever I hire this year will be expected to atted the NECC confrence in July. But we need more good teachers to become good administrators to fuel the vision. In the private sector I am lucky to have some autonomy to make sytemic changes in my school but the path is not easy because it means helping others, especially teachers, to see the vision for a new way of teaching. The tools ( and hte learning curve) scare some of them but at the heart of it all I think that though we have long given lip service to the "guide on side" model we have never found a way to bring it into common praxis. The technologies of podcasts , blogs, streaming video, and distant experts all force the issue.

Most of my peer will look at what I am doing as and oddity but litle by little, link by link , one educator to another I believe we will see new things happen.

[Bill Kerr]

hi clarence,

I've been looking around for some theorising about podcasting and its significance in the scheme of things and so your comments comparing blogging with podcasting are interesting. I'm trying to figure out what I'm getting into before I get into it.

I found this other discussion (from 2002 - it's old but I haven't found anything better yet), what is real podcasting
http://www.mcturgeon.com/blog/archives/2005/08/what_is_real_po.html
which presents a sort of podcasting manifesto but when I read the critical comments at the end, they seem to have more weight to me than the manifesto itself, particularly the comment from Patrick who said:
"what can you embed in a podcast? chapter markers, images? Links? Could you have live links when someone says something?"
and also,
"... because radio is an audio-based linear-time medium, the conventions that exist in current 'traditional' radio are there like the conventions of typography, and the medium (lead type vs. laser printer) didn't really change the basic rules"

This seems to tie in with your view that blogging is conceptual more significant than podcasting.

I also read and bookmarked some of your other related posts, that your kids like it but have some fear of losing control and also about the networking / studio aspect of the enterprise.

Thanks for your reflections, very helpful.