Just when you think there cannot be another educational technology to think about there is–Podcasting isn’t that recent but is growing in popularity. As essentially a broadcast technology I initially was less enthused about it (I mean I love my i-pod, but mostly for music. My 13 year old son Ross has been very interested in podcasting for some time and has been downloading news feeds to listen to on the subway in the morning on his way to school.
I have seen podcasting described as an audio blog and in that way it might serve a similar function to my “movies of the week” that I develop currently for students in my courses. However, I could start doing mini-lectures too–introductions to topics and more complex ideas. Would these be better as podcasts or as simple downloadable audio files? Not sure yet.
And, between video blogs, and short movies and audio notes and podcasts, it seems more a matter of user bandwidth, convenience and preference than anything inherent in the technology. One obvious difference though is accessibility–podcasts are out there, not simply in the database.
This page has everything: blogs, podcasts, blogrolls, flickr, RSS feeds: http://davidwarlick.com/connectlearning/
I wanted to think more about what kinds of ways I might use podcasting in my teaching, so am collecting a set of links here about educational podcasts:
http://www.stager.org/podcasting.html
Gary Stager’s site has some useful information on how to podcast.
http://www.edupodder.com
This site is interesting as it has everything you would expect to be linked, bloggers, RSS feeds and podcasting! From San Jose.
http://epnweb.org Then there is the very official looking site here, developed by the Landmark Project, a firm in the US creating a lot of web related technology–headed by David Warlick
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