Last week I read an article about Grammar Girl and had been thinking about podcasts for various reasons all week. Today, I was reading yesterday's USA Today article on podcasting and also noticed it mention Eric's Speaking of History blog. You might remember I first met Eric at NCSS and we've arranged to take our teachers to meet him in his classroom this summer. He's really inspiration and anytime you get the chance to meet him at a conference, it's very worth your time to so - his enthusiasm is contagious.
Eric's blog is a great way to share his enthusiasm for history, technology, and teaching. Blogging and podcasting allows teachers opportunities to collaborate and interact that just haven't existed before even though they do among administrators and those working in business.
Grammar Girl is a way to learn something we all need to know in small, digestable chunks. I can see this appealing to those who didn't know they would need to know these things the first time or few times they studied it. Or, for those who appreciate the knowledge later in life either because of work or "just because," she offers an easy way to access important information.
Gerald Zahavi of the University of Albany visited Michigan State this week. He's been doing aural (which includes oral history, music, the spoken word) history for decades now and it is a great way not only to engage students (and the general public) in history but to develop historical thinking skills. And, developing aural and video projects is an activity that students will remember forever in addition to adding to our larger historical knowledge base. His program, Talking History, includes new interviews and historical pieces of the spoken word encased with historical context.
As I was processing all this information and insight this week, I was thinking that ten years ago, we would have laughed at someone who asserted that people would be more interested in what they were listening to than the video sources they could watch. In our area, we are so used to driving and it is normally safer to listen to information or entertainment than to watch it. I've thought of podcasts as a way to allow students to listen to course-related information during their commutes or at their convenience rather than having to read a piece of paper. Podcasting also allows you to talk students through a particular exercise that might not always translate in print. Furthermore, the technology makes it easy to offer both audio and video podcasts with the same focus. The key is finding compelling video and/or images that are actually worth using and aren't just "pictures". Dr. Zahavi, for example, had a good PPT template basically divided into 4 parts with the video of the person speaking in the bottom right hand corner along with pictures, including newspaper clippings, in the other 3 sections.
We've tried to do some oral history projects with teachers but it's difficult for students to follow up without classtime specifically dedicated to it. Plus, delays in shipment of recorders also created a major hurdle given that, at least on one case, they came in as school ended instead of time for the last 3 weeks in which the project was outlined. Those are just part of the normal glitches of the technology.
One of the key points in considering any use of technology in teaching is to begin with using yourself to enhance your teaching and then think of ways to integrate it with students and then, the third step, is it possible logistically and otherwise to get students to utilize the technology and/or should they utilize it in the same ways?
