In my classroom the lesson that I am teaching most often dictates the audio technology I use to present that lesson. There are couple times when I will play a digital movie with sound to help introduce and reinforce a lesson. Another deciding factor in audio technology is what I have available to use. In my very diverse classroom I have always had a great need to reintroduce a lesson more than once to my students.
Until recently I have never considered using a podcast to deliver a lesson or part of a lesson to my students. In my classroom environment, podcasting could be a great additional tool to reach many of my students. Approximately 20% of my students are absent each day, with a percentage of those students absent several days at a time. This high absenteeism is a real problem. Since students at Harmon all have school assigned laptops with wireless capability, podcasting might be a good solution to this problem. A podcast of my lessons would be a positive tool to help those students who are absent from class understand the lesson or lessons they have missed and to get caught up in their work. Podcasts seem like a natural fit for my classroom and students since my classroom has computers, software, and the teacher and students all have access to audio free ware to produce podcasts. A small expense would be an investment in headphones for my students to have to hear the podcast.
Almost 50% of the student population at Harmon is ESL. By having a podcast of lessons available, my ESL students could listen over and over again, stopping and starting as needed. Because all students have desktops and laptops networked to each other and to the Internet in my classroom, they would have easy access to podcasts. It would take only a few minutes of instruction time to show students how to listen to the podcast of my lessons. On the other hand, it would take a considerable (but reasonable) amount of time on my part to make most lessons available to students in a podcast form. I would most likely want to podcast the lessons that many students have trouble understanding, especially the ESL students. Once I created the podcasts, it would be very easy to make the lessons available to students by placing the files on the school network to download and listen to at any time. I believe that creating podcasts of some of my lessons is something that I should seriously consider doing to help make my classroom a 21st century classroom. This would be a very positive learning enhancement for my students.
I have always tried to have a mixture of teaching and learning techniques in my classroom while incorporating collaboration when feasible. The MNEA 2010 summer edition article “Teaching with Technology: Being Part of the Shift” published these statistics about retaining what students learn from different mediums: 8% of what they read, 18% of what they hear, 25% of what they see, 50% of what they hear and see, 75% of what they hear and see and discuss, and 92% of learning is by doing. One can tell by these stats that multimedia alone is not sufficient, that a teacher must incorporate all the tools at their disposal and students must participate in their learning to achieve best results.
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Podcasting would be a great tool for your ESL students. Like you said, the ability to re-listen and stop and start would be very beneficial. Your statistics make me think that looking into vidcasts might be even more effective way to maximize student learning without a huge expense on your end since you can utilize a cheap webcam.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with the MNEA findings Rellen. Doing is the best instructor by far. Once, I took an Excel course and didn't feel I learned squat. A few years later, I needed Excel for my Accounts Payable part time job. I taught myself by doing more in a few weeks than by listening and reading for many class periods. It wasn't long before I was the Excel expert at my firm.
ReplyDeleteMy best lessons are one's where I have students complete tutorials on their own in my class. I provide clarification where needed, but they need to trouble shoot their actions on their own. The work is much higher quality, and the retention is better too.