Podcasting Tips

Source: Educator's Podcast Tips

Grab a podcast while you can!!

Depending on the source of your podcasts, the content of the RSS feeds for a podcast channel can change quite frequently. Podcasters may elect to publish new podcasts daily, weekly, monthly or only occasionally.

When podcasts are published on a daily or weekly basis you may find that the one you are interested in may "disappear" from the RSS feed and channel listing. Sometimes the podcast itself is no longer available to listen to or download, even in iTunes.

For educators planning to use podcasts with their learners, there can be nothing more frustrating than to discover the podcast is no longer accessible - for whatever reason! If there is a specific podcast you intend to use, the best tip is to make sure you download this to your laptop or desktop so it is readily available.

Guide to educational podcasting

Interested in a podcast guide for educators? Part of the Modeling Effective Education Technology MEET grant through the California Community Colleges and CCC Confer 2006, Donna Eyestone has authored a series of short podcasts about "how to podcast" for educators. Each of the podcasts are in the form of captioned movies and provide a useful guide to help educators get started with podcasting. The series cover all the key areas and each one is supplemented with transcripts.

Although the series has been published for some time, it still represents a valuable resource for professional development. The podcasts are listed in our podcast directory.

Podcasts descriptions

One of the great things about podcasts is the way in which they are published via RSS feeds. This makes it so easy to share information about the podcast with anyone. Writing a good description about a podcast episode is "a must". Why? Because it:

• provides the best insight into your podcast content;
• is displayed with the podcast listing in almost all podcast directories, and;
• allows the podcast details to be trawled by search engines such as Google (apart from iTunes of course!).

Don't ever underestimate the power of the wriiten word as search engines drive internet users to content, which can bring further interest in your podcast. But don't go overboard with your description. A good tip is to provide a brief but accurate description which contains all the keywords you wish to associate with the content of your podcast episode.

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 this graphic symbol together with explanatory text so you can spot the difference!

A free guide to podcasting

If you are looking for a comprehensive guide to podcasting then the website created by Micah Ovadia then look no further than this. Micah's website (PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education) features a 186-page guide that covers all you need to know. The guide is well indexed and covers a wide range of podcasting topics. A most valuable resource for educators.

Podcast tips from a CLC

Colleagues from the Wolverhampton City Technology Centre in the UK have published a valuable post entitled: "Tips for a successful school podcast". The post presents a range of interesting hints and tips about creating a successful podcast, based on practical experience. The post also includes examples of podcasts to illustrate the key messages.

This is a most useful resource that all teachers and other educational professionals will find invaluable.

Safeguarding in practice

The importance of safeguarding children and vulnerable young people is regularly highlighted. Educational podcasting is no different to any other form of internet access in that respect.

Here is a five-point safeguarding checklist that may prove useful for educators:

1. Have all podcasts been vetted for suitable content?
2. Do podcast channels originate from a reliable source?
3. Are other podcast channels listed in directories suitable?
4. Do web pages listing podcasts include links to appropriate content?
5. Is "educational podcasting" covered by the school's internet access policies?

The actual process of safeguarding in practice will obviously depend on the context, nature and scope of the computer systems that children and young people can access.

One thing is certain, you can never be too careful!

Interactivity and podcasts

There is an increasing number of teachers and lecturers in universities, colleges and schools making use of student response systems (SRS), sometimes referred to as "clickers". One of the benefits of such systems is that all learners within an educational setting are able to engage and participate in providing feedback and evaluations on a variety of content.

In a previous item, we referred to the value of evaluating podcasts produced by others as a very worthwhile activity. If you have an interactive whiteboard (IWB) and SRS then, why not combine these to evaluate podcasts as a class-based activity?

Play a podcast via your IWB and include a link to a URL resource of questions so that your learners can provide instant feedback - as in audience response surveys. Their responses can relate to different prompts at predetermined stages with results collated and shared in a variety of ways. A simple but effective form of evaluation!

It's cool to recycle!

As the end of another academic year approaches, thoughts turn to the new class next year. Now, if you are into producing podcasts with children and young people, why not raid the archive of podcasts that were created this year?

At the end of each calendar year, most podcasters produce a kind of celebratory podcast, highlighting some of the key moments from their podcasts over the past 12 months. In education, you can apply the same approach but do this for the academic year as well!

This is such a great "end of term" activity for children and young people, but also a good way to kick-start podcasting with a new group next term. What could be better than evaluating previous podcasts, selecting extracts and compiling a "best of" podcast? This approach would engage children and young people into the "cutting and pasting" as well as the editing of audio files, audio mixing and use of cross-over filters, writing and recording narrative introductions and the links between the extracts. Before you know it, there will be a 30+ minute podcast in the making and it's cool to recycle!

Just one tip - make sure that you use the original audio files (if you have them) as it is not easy to cut and paste audio files in MP3 or M4A formats!

Evaluating the quality of educational podcasts

A great activity for children and young people is to evaluate the quality of other podcasts, particularly if looking for ideas and a podcast to emulate. But a key question is what do we mean by a good quality podcast?

Writing criteria to evaluate educational podcasts is a demanding but rewarding activity. It is often better to separate decisions about the quality of content from the production quality. In practice, a podcast might have great content but be badly produced with, say, poor audio quality.

Criteria for evaluating the quality of content might be: the topic is presented in an interesting and imaginative way and the content is well structured and organised; and for the quality of production might be: the presenters are clearly heard above background music and effects with any audio effects used to enhance the content and presentation

If you are interesting in finding out more, we have included criteria for evaluating a selection of audio, enhanced and video podcasts in our online e-learning course: Podcasting Basics.

We have now published a PDF version of the criteria and prompts entitled "Evaluating Podcasts for Teaching and Learning". Download the PDF file (58 KB). In the near future, we will be publishing a version designed for use with children and young people.

Podcasts in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

Increasingly, schools and colleges are making more use of virtual learning environments to provide a portal to online courses, material, resources and information for young people and professional staff. An audio, enhanced or video podcast is just another resource that can be incorporated within a VLE in different ways:

• Include a direct link can be made to the podcast URL. This may be ideal for a topic area within a particular course but do check that the podcast is available on a regular basis. Some podcasters remove past podcasts and your students could be left "high and dry"!


• Provide a link to a particular page in a podcast directory, including iTunes. Depending on how the podcast directory is organised - and type of material that is included in the listings - this may provide the opportunity for young people to search and locate podcasts within a theme or curriculum area as part of an online activity. Within this directory, podcasts are categorised into curriculum and topic areas.


• Subscribe to the RSS feed for a podcast channel or a selection of podcast channels. this facility is is available in many VLEs and can be used to track updates. For example, some podcast channels publish podcasts on a daily basis.

As ever, the power and flexibility afforded by such Web 2.0 technologies makes many things possible. The only limit are the boundaries of our imagination as educators!!!

Podcasts for exam revision!

Reference was made to the possibilities of using podcasting for revision purposes in the section entitled providing alternative teaching approaches in our article "Exploiting the Educational Potential of Podcasting", published in April 2005.

As the season for public examinations and "study leave" will soon be upon us, there are two recent examples that focus specifically on revision activities. Primariliy aimed at young people studying Modern World History for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in their respective schools, these are:

• The "I Love History" podcast channel from Little Heath School, located in Reading, Berkshire, UK
• Mr Allsop's GCSE History Revision Guides, a podcast channel from Kings College for the Arts and Technology, located in Guildford, Surrey, UK

These podcasts would also be useful for any other students undertaking a course in Modern World History for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Of course, not every subject lends itself to an audio podcast for revision purposes in this way. Indeed, just relying on a podcast as the only revision strategy would be foolhardy! However, what these two examples do illustrate an innovative approach to the application of educational podcasting to support personalised learning, an agenda that is strongly promoted by the Department for Education and Skills here in the UK.

Collaborative podcasting

Within a school, the art of podcasting is truly a collaborative enterprise with children and young people. For a while, creating podcasts has tended to be very much focused on activity within a single school - but that is now changing!

As educational podcasting becomes more popular, more and more schools are beginning to develop collaborative approaches to subject material and exchanging links between schools. In some cases, schools within a locality are collaborating on a common topic or theme. The SOS podcast from Croftfoot Primary and St Mirin's Primary in Glasgow, Scotland is one very good example of this approach. Other schools are producing joint podcasts with shared content with other schools - sometimes in the same country or with schools in other countries. The Pod-Pals podcasts from Pinckney Elementary in Michigan, USA for example, includes examples of both.

With imagination and a lot of planning, it really does seem that anything is possible. Some good examples of podcasts are being published where children in one school pose questions answered by children in another. The resulting podcast seamlessly incorporates both elements, effectively masking the inevitable time-shift between the date and time of the recordings. A clear advantage of the flexibility of this podcast model is that it could help to encourage and promote "international conversations" across the different time zones around the world!

Some enthusisatic teachers have now started to use VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), such as Skype, to record a live podcast segment to great effect. All you need is a lot of patience, good time management and reliable technology to make collaborative podcasting a reality!

Searching and locating podcasts

It is now generally accepted that podcasting is one of the fastest growth areas on the Internet. The number of audio, enhanced and video podcasts grows daily and numbers in the tens of thousands already.

So how do you search and locate podcasts that might be suitable for use in the classroom? The answer should be simple - use Internet search engines or the search facilities of podcast directories. Everyone will have their own ideas on this - based on their experience, confidence levels and personal preferences.

Depending on the quality of information provided in RSS feeds by podcasters, all the major Internet search engines will retrieve information about podcasts. Similarly, almost all podcast directories incorporate some form of search function to help to locate podcasts. The former will provide the biggest and most powerful range of search options and, depending on the search criteria, a long list of possible options to explore. With the latter, you can at least be confident that the search will at least locate a podcast!

Of course, there is no substitute for "hands on" learning and practical experience. Deciding on which approach will prove the most reliable and produce a manageable list of results is important. This is particularly important if you are demonstrating the technique to a group of children or young people. One of the considerations will be the age range of the learners themselves and whether this will be a teacher-led or learner-led activity.

Searching and locating information in this digital age is invaluable nowadays and will often be a pre-requisite for curriculum requirements. See "Icebergs and Podcasts?" for more information about searching for podcasts.

"Video On Demand" in the classroom

There is more and more talk about "Video On Demand". For teachers with access to an interactive white board with fast broadband access to the Internet in their classrooms, this is now a reality.

There is an increasing range of video podcasts now available via the Internet - another useful resource for imaginative and ICT-literate teachers. Often, such podcasts are not overly long and can be ideal for sharing information, introducing a topic or to stimulate a class discussion. Sometimes, video podcasts are also referred to as vodcasts or vlogs (video blogs) and can be created in different formats.

Once you know where to find them, video podcasts are easy to locate and to use. All the "old VCR" or DVD player facilities like pause, fast-forward and rewind the video are readily to hand. If you really want to you can even play the video podcast backwards - if that is relevant!

There are plenty of video podcasts out there but be warned that you will discover some that are certainly not suitable for use with children and young people! Have a look at our weblog posting on "video podcasts for lessons" for an overview of the video podcasts that we have carefully selected and listed in our directory for use in schools.