Podcast is a largely used term in these days along with the RSS. Now these two terms may sound unfamiliar but actually they are very useful for the efficient use of online sources and using them in ELT classes.
Let’s start with Podcast. The term podcast may be a little confusing. Podcast is actually an abbreviation of “Personal on Demand Broadcasting”.
And many people think that it has a connection with I-pod or other products of Apple Company. But actually podcast is invented within the development of RSS service which I will mention about later.
Podcast and similar inventions of today’s world actually focus on our habits of following a broadcast. In good old days we used to follow TVs or radio channels on regular basis and when we missed one episode of our favorite show or program, our only hope was to wait for a repetition which was very rare and limited. For example TiVo, which is available in United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Taiwan, provide an electronic television programming schedule, and provide features such as Season Pass recordings (which ensure subscribers never miss an episode of their favorite shows) and WishList searches (which allow the user to find and record shows that match their interests by title, actor, director, category or keyword). TiVo also provides a range of features when the TiVo DVR is connected to a home network, including movie and TV show downloads, advanced search, personal photo viewing, music offerings, and online scheduling. TiVo is a different type of recording service but it has limitations especially about availability.
Back to our topic, podcasts serve similar TiVo, however it is completely free and available everyone who have a computer with a microphone and internet access. Microphone and a video camera are necessary if you want to be on the broadcasting side. Yes, you prepare some audio or video presentations or shows and broadcast them. In our context these presentations can vary from homework to activities and even assessments and feedbacks to students in language learning classrooms.
My presentation will focus on the practice side of Podcasts and I will try to give you some suggestions and advices to use podcasting effectively. In the first part I will mention about finding and following podcasts and editing them for your own purposes. Here we will mention about RSS also. In the second part we will take a look at how we can prepare our podcasts and share or broadcast them.
PART I Where to find? How to Follow?
The articles chosen for today’s presentation give some useful websites to check to find appropriate podcasts for language teaching and learning purposes. Some of them are actually perfect for our aims. Let’s take a look some of them...
http://digitalflotsam.org/ presented by P.W Fenton, offers enjoyable, easy to listen stories about American way of life. Recordings are clear and talks are easy to comprehend. You can download the podcasts, or just listen to them through your web browsers. The web site also displays notes and some extra commentary about podcasts written by the author of this web-site.
http://www.podcastalley.com is a broad website brining together different podcast broadcasters and offer a detailed information about reaching them. It has a “top ten list” on monthly basis which may lead you to check some popular podcasts of the month. It has also a nice Forum page which includes a bunch of software to follow and download podcasts from the web. I will also mention about this easier way of downloading podcasts in the later part of my presentation.
http://www.podcastpickle.com/ is another website grouping podcasts from different websites and distributing them. It is as they noted a podcast and vidcast community. It has a nice classification of podcasts; you can browse them by their genres and popularity.
http://a4esl.org/ is very useful website. Podcasts & YouTube part of this page includes “The 30 Newest ESL Podcasts” and “ESL Videos”. You can find very useful podcasts and videos to share with your students and use them in your classes.
Some of these may seem a bit off topic if you consider ELT purposes but computers give us a great space to be creative and edit these podcasts for our purposes. But before going to that step, we have two important services that will spare our time and gives us a better control on the web-sources that we want to follow. First one is using and RSS Feeder and the other one is to use a Podcast Receiver software.
1. Using RSS Feeder
A few years ago, if you wanted to be notified about the upgrades, about new information on a website, you used click on a button that says subscribe and give your e-mail address to send you notification mails about the changes. It can get a bit disturbing to see dozens of e-mails in your inbox telling you the news that you wanted to know about a website. This method still exist and useful but we have a better option today; that is RSS feeding. RSS is the abbreviation for “Really Simple Syndication” (Syndication = to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places.) An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed" or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999, the RSS icon ("
") first gained widespread use between 2005 and 2006.
By the way, XML is programming language that provides a basic syntax that can be used to share information between different kinds of computers, different applications, and different organizations without needing to pass through many layers of conversion which is actually most of the websites that we visit everyday.
Now let’s take a look at this video showing the RSS application in use. (If you can not access "youtube", please check: http://eltr.blogspot.com/2009/01/youtube-yasa.html )
As you can see this method is not only useful for following Podcasts but also every bit of online information that you may want to check.
I strongly suggest you to use Firefox as a web browser it is more secure than Internet Explorer, it is free, easy to use and rapidly developing and it overweighs Internet Explorer in many aspects.
To use Google Reader you should have a Gmail account, thanks to this class I am sure everyone have one. When you log in to your Gmail account you can see links to your Google Reader.
When you surf on the web with you will see this orange icon near the URL of the website you are visiting.
When you click that icon, you will see this screen.
Be sure you choose Google among other options and then click the button to subscribe. If you see this page just choose “Add to Google Reader”.
This will direct you to your Google Reader page; you can see the new page among other RSS feeding subscription. You can also add subscriptions manually by clicking “Add a subscription” and type the URL of the website.
There are other RSS feeders to use but I guess it is the most convenient one for us.
2. Podcast Receiver Software
There is a large variety of free software to download and subscribe to podcasts. You can visit this address http://www.podcastalley.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=258 to see a well collection of these software and some user comments related to them. This page also gives you the links to the webpage of software developer where you can find detailed information and download links.
You can also choose other software working on different operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux.
I can suggest Juice which was known as Ipodder for you. You can visit http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/ to download and learn more about this software.
There are some advantages and disadvantages of these Podcast Receiver Software.
Advantages
- You can subscribe to podcasting websites and reach to their content without visiting their website.
- These software automatically download the podcast to a directory you specify. It can be a folder in your hard drive or your portable music player.
- You can see all the previously published podcasts in a clear way and download them easily.
Disadvantages
- Sometimes you should be picky to choose the appropriate podcast file. As these software automatically sometimes it is just useful to fill your hard drive with the podcast files that you do not want to download.
- It can be a bit tricky for some websites to integrate with these software. Some web sites have agreement with Apple C.O and they only let you use iTunes as software to download the podcasts. You can also use iTunes, it is free but there are web sites having problems with iTunes.
PART II How to create your own Podcast
Although it may seem like a difficult task, preparing podcasts and publishing them through a web site is easy. Podomatic.com is a very suitable and user friendly online service for this task. When you register to Podomatic.com you come up with this screen.
You can immediately start recording your podcast with your microphone and webcam. Or you can prepare a podcast on your computer and edit it with some free software and then upload this file to Podomatic. You can follow the steps to complete the task you want. They are very easy to understand and as clear as possible.
To edit your files I suggest you to use Audacity to edit your sound files. It is easy to use. It shows your sound files like this.
You can edit your voice by cutting, removing some parts, pasting other sound files and integrating them and adding some filter to reduce noise and add some other effects to your recording. There is some other software for voice editing but Audacity is simple, free and very effective.
Using Podcasts in Class
Students as Consumers
- Comprehension practice
- Sound discrimination activities
- Jigsaw listening
- Feedback
- Describing a picture or a story with deliberate errors, and students spot dispcrepancies.
Student as Producers
- Audio reviews of their favorite movies/books/plays…
- Interviews with other students or teachers on specific topics
- Introductions to local sightseeing spots
- Their comments on projects produced by other class members.
- Virtually anything that you might have them to write a composition on.
Practice
- They can record their own voice to practice intonation, pronunciation, and rhythm.
- Students record their own performance of a conversation from the textbook materials trying to make it sound as close to the original as possible.
- Students do a "pair taping" activity where they try to have a free-flow conversation within a specified time limit on a topic of their own choosing, or from a list of suggested topics.
- Shadowing tasks [A. Campbell]
- A set of rapid-fire questions to which the students must prepare their own answers within the space allowed on the recording.[A. Campbell]
EXTRAS
Dear friends you can visit http://www.teu.ac.jp/media/~campbell/confs/2006Granada/index.htm to see the work of Campbell A. about Integrating record-it-yourself .mp3 files into speaking or writing courses.
Link to PowerPoint Slides (scroll through using the right arrow key)
Link to Audio Presentation (mp3 file, 35 mins) (left click and save to your hardrive)
Kayıtlar
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder