Blog #4 Podcast & Vidcast

Wow, I didn't know that making a podcast or vidcast was so simple! I loved learning how to make vidcasts and podcasts. I had heard about a podcast before, but I had never really known what they were. I feel that having these technological skills will help me to better my classroom such that the students will become familiar with technology, if they aren't already.

The students will use podcasts/vidcasts to learn the processes of new material. As a teacher, you could use podcasts by explaining the steps to certain math problems or the format of projects, etc... Then you could post them on your classroom website and if the students needed to refer back to math problems or project formats they are able to access them easily through the internet.

I am going to use the podcast that I made in our classroom for sure in the future. Prerecording a podcast or vidcast would ensure that your presentation/lesson could turn out the way that you would like it to. It would take the stress off of you, as a teacher, and you would already have part of your lesson on video and ready to go, as long as you have a back up plan as well in case something didn't work right.

I think that posting podcasts and vidcasts on the classroom website would be a great idea for a student to refer to if they happened to miss a day in class. This would work best if the teacher put something on from each day, which I think is a valuable tool to use. Then the student would understand a little of what was taught at school that day so they wouldn't be as far behind on their work.

Why Let Our Students Blog?
The video clip made me think through all of the things that blogging can help children learn and accomplish. I had never thought of blogging as a source of education, but now I see it as something that could be very useful within education. I think that it would be fun to have each one of the children do blogs, as we do. Have them do weekly reflections like a journal, but instead on the internet. Give them a question that they can answer. I think that it would be interesting to do blogs and then give them questions about a topic, but a week before it will be taught, so that you can see before hand a little of what the students know already, like a pretest.