Teachers, Students Go Online With Podcasts

Parents can hear their child read and speak in class and get a taste of what teachers are doing by listening to podcasts on their personal computer.

Highlands County teachers started using podcasts recently to put lessons and the students themselves on the Internet.

A podcast is an audio or video file that is available online for listening or viewing by others.

Sun 'N Lake Elementary technology resource teacher Mark Hilburn said some of the teachers at his school started creating podcasts last week.

Kids love to record themselves, he said. Once they realize they can do this work and put it on the Internet, it's going to make it that much more enticing for them because they love to be on the Internet. Anything that excites them is good, he added.

Advanced Academics teachers have been learning how to podcast recently with a two-day instructional session with Cracker Trail Elementary teacher Ian Belanger.

The first-day teachers learned how to record their podcast material. They used a free recording application available on the Internet called Audacity.

The second day they learned how to upload their files so they become a live podcast.

Belanger offered a recent example of how podcasting helped an absent student keep in touch with her class.

The student was in Miami with a sick grandparent with a lot of time on her hands while her parents were at the hospital, he said. The student informed Belanger by e-mail while he was at school that she had just watched a podcast of what her fellow students were doing in school.

The term podcast was coined by Apple Computers as a way to market their IPods, but any MP3 file or video file can be downloaded onto a personal computer, Belanger explained. An IPod is not necessary, if you have a personal computer and the Internet you can listen to what people are creating and other people in the world are creating.

Wherever a student may be, they are able to listen to work that they created or the work the teacher created like a study podcast, he said.

"The possibilities for tying into curriculum are endless," Belanger said to fellow Cracker Trail Elementary teacher Sue Donaldson.

Donaldson replied "Vocabulary - they are going to love to listen to their voices so that will be good to learn vocabulary words."

Heidi Stivender, a gifted resource teacher at Cracker Trail and Fred Wild Elementary schools, said "we've started this in story telling; recording their stories it makes the kids really get interested."

Video podcast capability will be available to teachers soon, Belanger said.

Belanger's audio podcasts, which are accessed on his Web page on the school's Web site, feature:

• Expository writing - a student reciting his paper on what he did during his summer vacation.

• Robust Vocab Lesson - two students using a different vocabulary word in a sentence and offering synonyms for their word.

• Science amplitude - Belanger offers a lesson and examples of sound amplitudes.

• Readers Theatre - students taking turns reading aloud from a book.