Podcasting seems like a great way to reach the needs of many different types of learners, auditory, visual, perhaps even kinesthetic (if the students are the ones creating the podcast).
It’s certainly something I could imagine using in a school library. Imagine four third graders, who are advanced readers, just finishing reading The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman. They can divide the story into different important events and illustrate those events. Then they can scan the drawings and insert them into a slide show. Next they would record their own retellings of the story. They could present the final product to the whole class on an interactive white board.
One concern I have about podcasts is the practicality of it being uploaded to mp3 players or cell phones. Though some schools, like the Tidewater Community College featured in the USA Today article, receive grants in order to supply all students with an iPod, this is not the norm. Depriving a student of the experience due to lack of money (or other reasons their parents have chosen not to buy them iPods) would be shameful. From the standpoint of someone with an elementary background, I appreciate the possibilities that the articles are trying to illustrate, but I would be wary of this practice for now. Perhaps in ten years no one will be without an mp3 player, just as nearly no one is without a cell phone today.
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You don't have to have an iPod to record or play an mp3 file, just a computer or any device that plays digital audio like a CD player (quite a few phones have this capability too). I like your ideas for connecting podcasting to a text the students read.
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