Podcasting

This week we spent the class learning about Podcasts; what they are and how to create and use them.
We started the lesson by learning about what Podcasts do. They are audiofiles that talk about something, teach something, or give people something to listen to. For example, we watched a Ninja podcast which explains or teaches something to its audience.
Second, we talked about tools we can use to create a Podcast for others to view/listen to. We discussed Zoho Writer, Audacity, and Pod-O-Matic. Zoho Writer is an electronically based word processor, which we will use to collaborate our lesson we will teach with a podcast. Audacity is the tool we will use to record our voices and add music or sound effects. It is an open source sound editor which will be the basis of our podcasts. Pod-O-Matic is the podcasting service we will use to host and distribute our audio files.
We also discussed various ways to subscribe to a blog. I thought it was interesting that we can subscribe through iTunes...something I never realized or noticed before this class.
We were then able to practice using the tools. We worked with audacity to learn how to import/export our audio files, how to split tracks, record multiple tracks, and give our sound different effects. We also worked with Zoho Writer to collaborate a lesson with our groups that we will teach using a Podcast.

This lesson can be applied in classrooms once we are teaching in a couple of ways. It would be fun to have students create podcasts as reviews of various lessons taught in class. We listened to a few examples of this in class. I think students would be reviewing material in a new way be creating these podcasts. They could also create podcasts for fellow class or school-mates to teach a lesson. Perhaps students could break into groups to become "experts" on a topic and use a podcast to teach the rest of the class.
I also think that the tools we used could be used in the classroom, separate from podcasts. Zoho Writer would be a great way for students to complete group work in class and be able to work on group assignments from home.

I liked the idea of calling into a podcast, as a teacher we discussed often does. I think that it is very helpful to be able to record over the phone at a time that may be convenient for you, although I'm not sure how I would do recording while driving! I think it would be hard to think about the topic of the podcast clearly without being totally focused on it. My question about this is if a podcast is already posted/hosted somewhere, can the creator still go back in to change it as they want, even if it is already being viewed?