January 2008 — Features
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Building a Better Podcast
"You might end up having a school in Australia or New Zealand listening to the podcast to see what's going on here," says Schrock, who notes that local parents and administrators also can sign up. "That's the beauty of it—you simply never know who will sign up."
Of course, contributing to a podcast feed requires consistency—which means educators must be convinced to produce podcasts more than once a year. Wells-Ogunquit's Sprankle says that those educators who make only one podcast usually don't have much success with it. To make the most of the technology, he explains, IT coordinators must do their best to help educators incorporate podcasting into the classroom routine and motivate their students to produce podcasts regularly.
"One podcast is neat and fun, a unique diversion," Sprankle says. "Do a bunch of podcasts and it becomes something the students look forward to."
The easiest way for educators to weave podcasts into the curriculum is to commit to recording a certain number of them during the year, and to include them with lesson development. Technology coordinators can help by providing access to podcasting technology all year long. This enables educators to highlight at the beginning of the school year which parts of their curriculum might lend themselves to podcasts.
Follow the Leaders
The best way to stay on top of the latest innovations in podcasting is to study what others are doing. The Education Podcast Network is a great place to find other K- 12 podcasts, and Feedburner users can search for files from other schools as well. Even Google Reader has a feature through which the news aggregator plays back podcasts and gathers together entries from newsfeeds.
It is relatively simple to download individual podcasts and transfer them to a school's intranet or personal listening device. If a technology coordinator wants to automate this process, a school can subscribe to podcasts using podcatching software and RSS feeds. Use podcatching software to specify particular podcasts that you want to receive regularly, and have the software download the files automatically to a folder or directly to your listening device. Some of the better programs include Juice, Doppler, jPodder, and iTunes.
Of course, the best way to "catch" podcasts is to ask friends and colleagues which ones they're listening to. In a burgeoning business like this one, word of mouth can be the best form of advertisement. Apple, which has sold nearly 125 million iPods since 2001, can attest to that.
Matt Villano is a freelance writer based in Healdsburg, CA.
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