Podcasting, Video and Screencasting, and Live Streaming
Great, besides websites, photos, tweets, status updates, news, and data, one can also have podcasts, screencasts, and live streams delivered to their RSS. I’m not overwhelmed at all.
Let’s begin by discussing podcasts. I have a really hard time listening to podcasts. I get “Motivational Mondays” from The National Society of Leadership delivered to my inbox every week, and I listen to part of one every once in a really blue moon. It’s difficult for me to pay attention to talk radio, unless I’m trapped in my “car” without any music. I do plan on using podcasts in my classroom though for the sheer purpose of documenting language progression.
Video is just a sweet form of media. When I was in junior high and high school, we loved messing around with video projects, although we by no means did any editing. I would say it was definitely the most time consuming projects we ever did, but they were usually really fun, and I can still remember the content I had to learn and recite for them.
Screencasting on the other hand is not my favorite to produce. It has its purpose and place; and if my students want to use it, I’ll allow them the option, but I don’t think I’m going to require that from them. I think when you begin to require excessive amounts of “fun” activities, all the fun is drained from them and they begin to hate what they once loved. So I believe in options.
Live Streaming-no. When I think of live streaming, I think of music artists doing Q&A sessions with fans. Maybe if you weren’t able to make it into the class one day for whatever reason, you could have the sub do a majority of the lesson plan, but connect to a live stream if you needed to correspond with the class. I’m not really sure though, how else it would be ideal for the classroom. Richardson stated that one teacher used live stream for every class so that people could see what he was doing, which is a comforting idea, but also a little nerve-racking I guess. I just see Big Brother taking over.
It’s become rather apparent, that there are many, many forms of media and production services available for free on the infinite and glorious web. It would be a shame if I’d labored over this book learning about them and didn’t implement them into my wonderful little language classrooms. I plan to dabble in all of these methods of communication for fun, and for work, so that my students can be knowledgeable as well and have options to share what they have learned.
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