My first contact with podcasts was brief, accidental, and uninformative. It was basically a group of guys arguing opinions on the details of a football game that had recently ended. It seemed as though there was no legitimacy to the conversation and any credentials that these men had were not made apparent through their words. However, I recently became more knowledgeable of podcasts and other similar programs. While the random guys bickering about the football game is an example of a podcast, it is not indicative of the entire scope of what a podcast is, nor does it reflect the true utility in the classroom.
Being a foreign language teacher, I am sure that I will be using some form of podcast or a sister program in my classroom at some point. Auditory learning usually takes a back seat to visual learning, which is somewhat warranted, but using the visual stimuli in addition to the auditory feedback is extremely useful and effective. I have found that listening comprehension is a very difficult aspect of learning a foreign language. Podcasts and other programs such as google voice allow students to practice their auditory skills as well as their oral affluence.
For instance, I am currently in a college course where our homework is to call into a google voice number a couple times a week and speak in a foreign language. It is very little work for the teacher and it allows the student to complete the task on his/her time. Podcasts could be used much in the same way. Students could record a conversation in a foreign language that is taking place in a virtual cafe. Allowing students to get creative with means such as podcasts and google voice to complete assignments is an effective way to reach the interests of increasingly tech savvy students. It is also a great way to gauge comprehension and assess the skill level of your students. This can be done as a take home assignment or something that the students complete outside of school and bring it in to share with the class. It seems as though the options are wider than one would think. Especially one who thought podcasts were exclusive to terrible sports talk. I got schooled. Hopefully I can school some students with this material.
You wouldn't have started Tim Tebow over Tom Brady? I thought their argument was sound. Great thoughts on podcasts. It is interesting to see how the discipline can shape the way in which we assess a particular tool. I wasn't quite as smitten with podcasts as others were, but I feel as though that is because I'm a history guy. I guess you could ask students to give a report via a podcast or read a response to a question, but that doesn't seem very productive on either end. I was much more intrigued by Fakebook and Prezi because I could see them playing a role in my classroom in the near future. The one way that I could definitely see Podcasts playing a part is via recording a lecture and making at available for those students that missed the class. But even then they would have missed out on things in class. Anyway, great thoughts and we should consider starting a more informed football podcast. You have Matt Berry's number right?
ReplyDeleteHellooo Evan.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until reading your post that I was reminded of an assignment that I had in a college French class. We students were tasked with logging onto whatever course-management software our college used and recording instances of us singing some French song called "Sur le Pont d'Avignon". Weirdly, this is the one assignment from the entire class that I remember distinctly, and I still sing it in my head by accident once in a while, especially when I'm around you, Leah, and/or Destiney. I'm not sure how pedagogically effective it was, because the teacher wasn't fantastically transparent about what she was looking for when she listened to it, but I'm betting that she was assessing pronunciation. Hopefully she wasn't grading us on pitch.
I also think it's interesting that you bring up auditory learning in relation to the effectiveness of visual learning. It reminded me, of course, of Willingham, and that bull he's trying to peddle that there's no such thing as a preference for visual learning over auditory learning. I think that the former is so effective because human minds evolved as systems primarily honed to the task of operating spatially, and we think in spatial terms. Even our figures of speech reflect this: Something old is a throwback; someone concerned with the future and improvement is forward-thinking; the past is behind us; and that joke went over my head. Visual learning is so effective, I think, because humans evolved to draw information about their spatial surroundings primarily through the brain's visual processing system. As humans, we make cognitive maps by what we can see, mainly. If we were teaching snakes, we would teach in smells.
That being said, if we recognize that teaching is giving students the resources to build the most efficient and accurate cognitive maps possible, then we can understand that, if the auditory channel is most convenient, there are things that we can do to improve students' cognitive map-making. This is what explict signalling language is for.
TL;DR: I sang a French song to the internet once. We should create Podcasts with the understanding that humans will learn from them by conceptualizing them in semi-spatial terms.
See you soon,
Matt
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, Evan, because I feel like we are similar in so many ways, but this is something we definitely disagree on. I don't ever plan on using podcasts in my classroom. I find podcasts extremely boring, and lacking stimuli that would otherwise keep me entertained. I agree that students need to practice their auditory skills, which sometimes fall behind visual skills. However, if I want them to practice listening to French, I would have them watch a clip of a French film (with visual) to understand what is happening with context, and then once they have background knowledge, turn off the TV and have them just listen to the words. For me, that would work, because I would have the images that go with the words in my head. Additonally, they can practice auditory skills by listening to me, their teacher, speak French. Secondly, on our OPIC class, I think Barbara spends a lot of time analyzing our responses to the google voice. I think it's not time we see but I think she told me she spent relatively 40 mins on each of us scoring our responses. She got better over time but I don't think this would be functional for a teacher with so many students. I definitely look forward to seeing how you work with podcasts in the future. Maybe you will convert me! I love seeing our different opinions and understanding how you think through this blog post. Thanks :)
ReplyDelete