Room With A View

There’s plenty of buzz about podcasting these days. It makes me wonder why and is this just a fad? What is compelling within the medium that will make it become embedded in current pedagogy? Should it become embedded? I won’t answer these questions here—at least not today. Today my advice is to think small.

There are teachers out there that are doing elaborate podcasts, complete with theme music and transitions between stories—great. But it’s time consuming. My guess is that teachers that do complete polished shows, do so on their own time. They’re not doing it during school hours. Assuming podcasting deserves to be an embedded pedagogy, time is what will prevent it from becoming one. So here’s my tip, keep it simple. Use the KISS principle. Rather than trying to do elaborate polished shows, do bite sized chunks. Have a show that contains one small bit of information. Because of RSS this is entirely doable.

One small chunk can be published one day and the next chunk can be published the next day. Because of RSS iTunes can pick up the chunks when they’re ready. Here’s an example from one of our music teachers.

Each autumn our school has a concert involving choir students, band students, orchestra students, and members of the community. There’s a guest conductor. It’s no stretch to say it’s a really big deal. The final couple of pieces involve the entire ensemble. The choir teacher had the added challenge of getting community members and choir students to learn their respective parts with as few rehearsals as possible. Enter RSS. The teacher recorded each part—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—as mp3’s. It was nothing fancy. She just plunked them out on the piano. As each one was completed she uploaded it to the school’s server and updated an RSS feed for the project. Choir members subscribed to the feed in iTunes and their parts arrived on their home computers. They practiced at home, got together for three rehearsals, and did the show. I was in the audience that night and I assure you. It was fantastic!

From a podcasting point of view it was pretty easy to do. There were no introductions or conclusions to write. There were no transitions or fancy effects to use. All was done with a minimum of editing. The lesson to take away from this is to keep it simple. Use the KISS principle.