Podcasts are a new technology that teachers everywhere should be using within there curriculums. If you’re not familiar with what podcasts are, let me fill you in. They are short or long prerecorded lectures, talks, or pieces of information that another person has created and then stored on the internet. For the most part, these podcasts are free to use and can be a great supplement to anyone’s classroom lessons. That being said, you must know where to access these great podcasts. That is where the article titled “Listen Up” comes into play.
Listen Up is a short article that gives a list of podcasts for each subject area that could be utilized by classroom teachers. The subject areas that are featured within this article include music, art, language arts, math, science, and social studies. Not only does it list each subject, but it tells a little bit about each of the podcasts and how they could be used. This type of information is really helpful especially to classroom teachers who either don’t have the time to look this stuff up on their own, or who aren’t familiar with podcasts. For example, under the social studies category, there is a podcast titled “Where In The World”. This fun podcast is designed by not only the creator, Dan Schmit, but by children around the world. Classrooms everywhere around the world can submit clues to their own location in the form of a podcasts. This allows then for other students, like your classroom, to go listen to the podcasts and try to figure out where in the world those students are from. This can be a great way to either quiz or review places on earth with your students based on their prior geography knowledge.
Providing access to great sources of information, such as this and other articles and websites, would be a big help in moving our school teachers to the next step of technology integration. That is where library media specialist come into play. We are there to find these resources for them and guide them in the direction of implementation. For this piece of technology, we could even create our own podcast about podcasts. Now that is making technology work for you! :)
If you plan on doing any training on podcasts with your school staff, I would highly recommend check out the article titled “Listen Up”. It does give great ideas that you could use to “sell” and get your staff motive about using this great new technology that we call…podcasts.
Adam, Anna, Mowers, Helen. (2007, December). Listen Up. School Library Journal, 53(12). Retrieved November 1, 2009.
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