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Amish Technology
Choosing Well: Technology in Curriculum

Podcasting: Have I hit the saturation point?

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Categories General
Tags administrator assessment curriculum podcast teacher

Here at the Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools we run an Applied Technology in the Classroom series every spring. It meets 4 times over 3 or 4 months, goes in depth into a technology that can be used in a classroom, and usually focuses on one particular piece of hardware.

For this year as well as the preceding 2 years, our subject is podcasting. Podcasting is one of those technologies that passes the Amish Technology test with flying colors. It engages students in a peer to peer and/or a public presentation, requires planning and forethought on the part of the podcast creator(s), and becomes an avenue of instruction rather than a subject of instruction. The value of any given podcast is not the technology but the content.

So this will be our third year doing, what I consider to be, a program that enhances curriculum and classroom engagement. Three years of one topic seems like a lot so I canvassed my former students about how they are using their hard-won skills.

Mostly, they use the podcast on occasion for a single large project. This may have to do with the paucity of hardware; most schools in this county do not have the money to invest in flash memory recording devices like the Zoom H2, so the teachers who attended my classes only have one unit rather than one unit for every 4 or 5 kids in their class.

Conclusion, podcasting has not even gotten close to saturation. The teachers in this county are simply suffering from a lack of support from their districts with regard to technology integration.

As an introduction or an antidote to ignorance of podcasting, I’ve decided to step up and create a podcast of our local Association of California School Administrators professional development programs. Our local president is excited about it, so maybe she and I can get the other administrators in the county to see the possibilities for curricular and administrative uses here in Tuolumne county.

Daniel

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Comments

Molly Large said:
Friday, November 21st, 2008 @ 1:30 PM
It might be interesting for your Applied Technology group to some applications of podcasting that lend themselves better to a mic attached to a classroom computer. Students might create a daily podcast of key points or listing homework, or teachers might create a weekly summary. With one unit, students could conduct interviews and create a news story; different groups might do the interviews on different weeks.

In short, don't give up - the planning, storyboarding, and writing skills the kids are developing make it worth finding work-around solutions until funding becomes more available. I firmly believe that, once parents and school boards see student-created podcasts in action, they will see the investment of a couple hundred bucks per classroom as money well spent.

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