Podcasting in Education

Believe it or not, podcasting can be very useful in the classroom. Both students and teachers can benefit from podcasting. Teachers can use existing podcasts to give the students additional information on whatever they are learning at the time and they can create their own podcasts for students to use and listen to at home if they have questions about what they learned that day. Students can create podcasts for projects and they can publish podcasts for people around the world to hear, just like blogs. Podcasting as a project can help those students who get stage fright and might not like to present in front of the class. Podcasting allows the student to work in the comfort of their own home and they have as many attempts as they need.

One useful podcasting tool is Spreaker. I recently had to use Spreaker for an assignment in my Instructional Technology course and it was an eye-opening experience. I thought that in order to have a podcast, you have to have a nice microphone and great editing software. Spreaker makes podcasting available to everyone. One great aspect of Spreaker is that anyone can access it, and you can access it through both desktop computers and mobile devices. College professors teaching online courses, like my Instructional Technology course, can have their students submit assignments and projects through Spreaker. Another benefit of Spreaker is that it is very user friendly. A technology novice can work Spreaker's DJ board with ease. Everything about Spreaker is self-explanatory, so you log in and instantly know what you're doing.

I was able to use iTunes to find a podcast that was interesting to me. (I already had iTunes downloaded on to my computer, but if you don't and you want it, you can download it for free here.) I went into the iTunes store and was able to find the "Educational Podcast" section. However, the only podcasts I could find that included English were ones that were helping people learn English as a second language. That's not what I wanted. I typed into the search bar "English literature podcasts." That is where I found the Grammar Girl podcast. It was exactly what I was looking for! After picking out what episode I wanted to hear and listening to it, I logged into my Spreaker account to make a short podcast about it. After logging in to my account, I clicked on the "Create" tab, and selected the "Web-Based Console" option. That took me to the DJ board, where I was able to record my podcast episode. I was able to add music and sound effects for free. I could also have added my own music or sound effects if I wanted to. After recording the episode, I was able to publish it, add tags so that I would be easier to find, add a description of the podcast, and share it on different social media platforms.

Here is my podcast that I made using Spreaker. It is a brief summary of the episode of Grammar Girl that I listened to. I hope you enjoy it! I know I enjoyed making it!


Listen to "iTunes Summary" on Spreaker.