Podcasts as a Course Resource

Here is a great article from Educause "Confessions of a Podcast Junkie"

Podcasts hold a great wealth of information. You can listen to podcasts while on the treadmill at the gym, or while at your desk working, or plug them in during your free time to learn more about things that interest you. That's a good way for us to use them for our own professional development, but what about student learning?

A Criminal Justice instructor turned me on to Grammar Girls Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing. She found this podcast a good resource to use with her students.

Another teacher in Japan hooked me to NPR Wait Wait, Don’t Tell me. This weekly podcast humorously relates current events and even includes a quiz to see if the audience has been listening. She passed it along to Social Students teachers to use as a resource for their students or for ESL teachers to build oral students' listening skills.

With so many podcasts to listen to how do we get students to find time to listen to podcasts that we feel will enhance their learning?

One way to do that is talked about in Confessions of a Podcast Junkie. Use the podcasts as support material after briefly discussing the topic in class.

Assign the podcast as required reading material, then use the discussion forums of Blackboard, Moodle, or your LMS to extend the discussion and learning beyond the classroom. By utilizing the discussion forums your students will get the ‘depth of learning’ often needed for certain topics that 50 minutes of class time doesn’t provide.

Or have your students listen to a podcast, then do a survey asking others what they think about the topic, and then report their findings to the class for oral discussion.

One thing to know is that podcasting is not just relegated to recording class lectures for playback; they can easily be integrated into your curriculum and used as a course resource to enhance student learning.