Podcasting "words and pictures"

An increasing number of schools are making use of enhanced podcasts to present and share a wide range of work produced by children and young people. Enhanced podcasts are a simple but effective multi-media format for creating "words and pictures", introducing a different set of skills for children and young people to master.

Podcasters can incorporate a series of images to illustrate a range of activities and samples of work from educational topics. In addition, enhanced podcasts can also include chapter markers to help organise content into various themes and these podcasts may incorporate hyperlinks that point to content on the internet such as pages on a school blog or website.

You can identify an enhanced podcast by the use of the .m4a file extension. However, this is not foolproof as some audio podcasts are encoded in AAC format and use the same file extension.

In our podcast directory we include a graphic symbol together with explanatory text so you can spot the difference! The description associated with an enhanced podcast listed in our directory will include the following line:

An enhanced podcast in AAC format.