Podcasting 101: Teaching Young Adults To Podcast
Apr 6th, 2007 | By James Lewin | Category: Audio Podcasting, Citizen Media, Educational PodcastsHere’s something that makes you realize that¬†there’s still room for¬†a tremendous amount of growth in podcasting; a high school in California is considering adding podcasting as¬†a new class in its curriculum.
Gary Bissell, a computer science teacher in Atascadero, Calif., is planning a new podcasting class. Bissell came up with the idea for the class, which is subject to approval by the Atascadero school board. Bissell attended a county education seminar that taught him how to podcast, and he was soon a big fan of the technology.
“Public speaking is involved, audio editing, script writing, organization and presentation,” Bissell said. Now that today’s students have been with computers all their lives, Bissell said, schools need to teach more than the basics.
Podcasting students will start with audio segments of several minutes and later move into video during the semester-long class, which will be limited to 25 students. After the students create their podcasts, they will upload them to the school’s Web site for downloading by the general public.
If other high schools follow suit, there could soon be a huge new generation of podcasters.
Hey Hey! I am a teenage podcaster! I don’t want my little nich taken from me! 😉
This sounds like a great idea. All they have to do is think of the possible things which could go very very wrong. Cyber-bullieing is going to go through the roof. Thing of podcasts dedicated to insults and mean songs about people. Us teenagers are a bad bunch! Oh well. Good luck to him with it.
Speaking from the perspective of a university professor (UConn) and podcaster, this does have pedagogical merit. Good podcast involves content preparation as well as the development of good listening and speaking skills (especially listening skills) along with speaking skills. Add to this the technological skills of audio recording, editing, and so on, and you’ve got a great deal of skills that will come in handy in so many ways and in so many careers. If done properly, this sort of course can be of high educational value.
David
Thanks for the great feedback. I couldn’t agree with you more. Trying to teach public speaking, though, probably isn’t as sexy to kids as teaching them to be Internet media stars.
In addition to being useful life skills, Internet media experience is going to be very valuable in the near future, and we’re going to need a lot of people with those skills. Advertisers are moving their money to the Internet rapidly, because that’s where the attention is, and this will support an explosion of new content.
Internet media knowledge may also encourage critical media thinking.