Blog Assignment #4

Podcast

After reading/listening to “A Worldwide Audience for Six Year Olds?”, “Flat Stanley Podcast”, “Dinosaurs after Dark podcast”, and more, I realized Ms. Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano was not only teaching her students how to use technology, but teaching them how to find information on their own, to be enthusiastic about learning, to be creative, to be innovative, and to use technology to explore the world. My favorite was the “Flat Stanley” podcast. I was amazed at how well these young children were doing! It expressed the student’s enthusiasm and showed how students had to brainstorm their own ideas and research interesting places on their own (with the help of parents). The podcast gave the students the ability to mix creativity and learning! It made me think back to Sir Ken Robinson’s video, “The Importance of Creativity”. Instead of teaching creativity out of the children, Ms. Tolisano is using the children’s creativity to increase their education.
Joe Dale’s “Benefits of Podcasting in the Classroom” proved how podcast are almost necessary in the classrooms of today. Podcast are great to keep absent students caught up and are a great tool to keep students interested! Podcast are a wonderful hands-on activity, students of all ages can use to learn about different subjects and to connect with the world. Students can use podcast as an opportunity to reach other students in the world and possible earn feedback from different perspectives. I personally would have never thought of podcast as the solution to helping students who are sick and/or absent for a long while.
After reading/listening to Ms. Tolisano blog posts and Joe Dale’s podcast, I began to brainstorm about ways to include podcast into my future classroom .However, there was one problem; I had no idea how to do a podcast or where to even begin. Thankfully, Judy Scharf Podcast Collection answered most of my questions. The collection gave me ideas of how to teach my students to podcast and where I could learn how to create a podcast! The tip, “Invite the principal, department chairperson, or some other person to come in and see the presentations. Students will be very proud of their work”, in the Tips to Succeed section was my favorite. It will give students more of a reason to want to learn and produce a podcast of their own! I will definitely use this idea. Mrs. Scharf also include exemplary podcasts and a grading rubric. As a future teacher, this will be a great site for me to build off of.