My Personal Learning Space!

My Great Passion 

This is my first ever attempt at making my own podcast. In this podcast, I speak of my “Great Passion”.

Making a podcast was not as hard as what I thought it would be. It was actually really enjoyable to make. I created mine through the program Garageband. As I was using a Mac computer, the microphone was built into the computer itself. So this made the process of making a podcast that much easier.

I was able to test out various background sounds and jingles to add to the podcast to make it a bit more interesting. The whole process of writing, making and playing back a podcast was very simple and very effective. As a future teacher, I do think it is possible that the use of podcasting and the listening to podcasts can be incorporated into everyday lessons.

Now as for my great passion, it is something I have had since I was really young. If I try for a moment to mix my passion itself and podcasting, I think a really good recipe can be formed. Through podcasts a student can be reached from anywhere across the world, they can be taught life lessons and can interact with other students. Therefore I think it is possible for students within Western Sydney to be taught of their worth and to be shown there is more to life through podcasting (this being one of many tools). With saying this, I also believe that if these students have more acess to this growing technological world, they may be inspired to be more than they think hey can achieve.

It’s worth a try…

This posting refers to an online commentry entitled ‘Integrating podcasting into your classroom’ by Colette Cassinelli, Technology Evangelist (2007).

In this commentry, the video quotes the following statement from Mark Prensky: ‘Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital laguage of computers, video games and the internet… our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language, are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language’. The issue that this commentry then addresses is how teachers can learn this new foreign language and then use it within the classroom. By using a program such as Garageband (for Macs) or Audacity (for PC’s) students can make their own radio stations programs. In these programs, students can interview famous people (acted out by other students), recite a poem that they have written, give a verbal account of something that they see, and so much more. Podcasting can be a way by which students teach students about a particular subject, or even communicate with students from another school across the other side of the world. For someone who for the first time only recently made a podcast, I think that it has many uses in the new age classroom, and I cannot wait to have the opportunity to test it out.