Community of Podcasting Practice

I teach an undergraduate “General Astronomy” class of 100 students twice per week. To keep them up to date with the latest happenings in Astronomy, and to give them a broader view of the subject, I have decided to incorporate the independently produced “Slacker Astronomy” podcast into the class.

This ~15 minute podcast is produced once/week and focuses on a recent astronomy-related news story. It gives a background to the subject of the news report and explains why it is important, all with a sense of humour and a laid-back style.

Listening to this podcast each week has been assigned as homework for the students. They should have listened to it by the Thursday lecture where we spend the first 15 minutes of class discussing what was contained in the news item.

This will enhance student learning by:

• connecting the course material with the grander picture of astronomy and how it teaches us about the Universe
• promoting interest in astronomical happenings beyond what is covered in the course curriculum
• showing that astronomy is not an historical science — new discoveries are being made all the time

Any thoughts/comments?

Anyone else have an idea for podcasting they’d like to share?

What is a podcast really good for?  It will allow you to post and automatically downloaded material once you subscribe, for busy people that is great, it also could allow you to set up all your lectures to be instantly made available in your blackboard site once recorded.

But why would you use it for anything other than delivery of a presentation?

In what way could you use podcasting to engage students in active learning?

I have a suggestion.

Here is the scenario – blurb (students take it away to work on) This could be delivered in a variety of ways, paper, video streamed, in the lecture etc. etc.

Stop Press – podcasts with latest information – could be delivered at various times to update students with further information (this could be the same or different information to each group – perhaps in a different order…)

Students will need to adapt to changes over time (and that will depend on what they are told and what order they get the info)

Completion of the work – report, or presentation or perhaps… some other means based on the latest information combined with previous.

Then I can see it working as a tool to facilitate active learning

I would be interested in anyone’s comments about this idea – would it be feasible, what about the time involved… how costly

Kay

Hi guys -

Here is the idea I introduced in the workshop for a student-created podcast in an english course:

As an assignment in a course on Shakespeare, the students are given a piece of prose to read and record as a podcast. Each student posts their podcast to the BlackBoard site, and critiques the podcasts of the other students outside of class time. The face-to-face lecture is then used for a group discussion on the different interpretations rendered in this exercise.

This could enhance student learning in many ways:

• The creation of the podcast requires the students to gain their own understanding/interpretation of the prose and to communicate that in an audio format
• The offline critique requires students to reflect upon their own understanding/interpretation while evaluating that of their colleagues
• The time-shifting effect allows students to come to the face-to-face lecture with arguments and ideas already in hand. This will facilitate the discussion allowing the different interpretations to be explored in more depth.

What do you guys think? Any ideas on how to improve/modify this idea to enhance student learning?

(Note: I’m not an english teacher)!

What ideas have you come up with for podcasting in your own classes? I’d love to share ideas in this community.