BAW06

Daf

What are podcasts, why might your students benefit from listening to them, and how might you go about using and producing them?

Silvana Carnicero

I believe that the good thing is that they will be planning a speech for a real audience and they will neeed to work on editing a lot. Besides, sometimes it is difficult to find listening material on the topics we are dealing with and podcasts will help us in this.

Erika crunivel

Your are right! It has always been very difficult to find suitable listening materials for our students. But with podcasting, a teacher’s job becomes much easier. You can find listenings related to all topics in the Internet. I started using podcasts last year and my students loved listening to authentic material. Podcasting is something new to me. The only thing I have already done was to download some interviews to my ipod and played them in class, but they were very well related to the topics my students were learning about. Now I have to learn how to record my own podcasts.

Angeles Heràndez

Is it envisaged that podcasting becomes one of the most popular uses of online EFL/ESL resources? THis might be so if there were big institutional projects which fostered the recording of a wide range of poscasts to be put up on a server and bedcome available for teachers and students based in non-English speaking countries. Adapting Videocasting and podcasting for language teaching purposes is important, especially for lower learning levels. For the most advanced there is already a wide range of non-adpated reasources. Scripts are also necessary!
Encouraging collaborative environments of teachers to generate materials is also a step forward to helping teachers working on their own and far away from English speaking countries. I see podcasting and videocasting as a powerful tool for all those teachers in little villages with usually limited budget to buy DVDs or videotapes for their children. As a non-native English teacher, spoken resources were always the scarcest. This is what this new means must restore.

Daf

Once you belong to a community like webheads, it is very easy to find colleagues all over the world who are willing to record podcasts tailored to your needs. That’s how I started using podcasts with my students. After they became familiar with the process, I had them create their own podcasts, and they had a lot of fun in the process. Even though they were low-intermediate, they did a great job, and most important they lost the fear to speaking out loud in English. They ended up creating video-podcasts I agree with you that for EFL contexts podcasts are a not-to-miss resource.
Julia Yatsenko
Podcasting is really a way out when the record library at the Uni has become out of date and incomprehensible and the authorities are not ready to understand it. As for having students create their own podcasts, I think my students are not ready for this: not all of them have DVD players and few of them have PC at home. Though we have a multimedia lab I’m not sure that students have free access to it.

Moira Hunter
I am really glad that I read all of these articles, then listened to Graham and Bee and everyone else at Alado on Tuesday before commenting here. I’m really looking forward to this evening too
I have listened to and viewed podcasts as an individual, but have not used or created them yet for or with my learners.
With all technologies or ‘toys’, you need someone to play with, to see if it works. Few of us are lucky enough to work in an environment which gives this support and ’springboard’ to what I would describe as ‘modern day learning’. The webhead community certainly does make this possible, as you say, Daf, and this is wonderful for the isolated teacher wanting to do something ‘authentic’ with a different approach for the ‘modern day learner’.
So, I’m now waiting for Kat’s tutorial on podcasts and mobile phones