Before this week, my experience with podcasting was limited to listening to a couple of current events podcasts from ITunes while I was really there searching for songs to download. In my mind, most of the podcasts out there were what I equated to stream of consciousness thinking out loud. Boy, is there more out there than I thought!
This week I spent time exploring the world of podcasting – and trying to focus on its usage in the elementary school setting. I am the librarian in a K-5 building with 870 students. I wondered what the value of podcasting was, and if it was worthwhile to try and use this tool in the library classes I teach. So…I went to good ole Google and searched under “school library podcasting”. Rather quickly I found a site that blew me away. There is a very techie school librarian at Grandview Elementary School in New York State (www.grandviewlibrary.org/Librarian.aspx). Her whole website is amazing. I quickly learned that she does a lot of innovative things with the teachers in her school. She is obviously known as a podcasting expert outside her school, too, since she has links to her contributions to School Library Journal Online. She had a podcast with images displayed. So I watched her explanation of podcasting and it was phenomenal.
Another school heavily into podcasting was the International School in Caracas, Venezuela (www.cic-caracas.org/elementarylibrary/). The librarian there had a great podcast done by the second graders. They had read books from the “Black Lagoon” series by Mike Thaler. Then they wrote their own story. The students took turns reading one page each in their very own podcast. The fourth graders wrote their own “Just So Stories”. The stories are then put in the podcast which is accessible through the school website. Some schools also showed slides of student artwork that ran as the podcast aired.
The more I explored what elementary schools were doing, the more I got excited. The uses are many. Podcasts can be a portable way for students to learn, or sometimes a way for remediation. The more they hear something, the more they understand it. What if they missed something during class? If it was available for them to hear again, the lesson might become clearer. Podcasting is an alternate method of showing what students have learned. Tuning into the podcast, parents can find out what their child, and other students, have learned in class. Podcasting offers a method of bringing a featured speaker from another location or archive to students. This is something I have struggled with. How do you overcome the cost of bringing an author to a school? Podcasting is one way to do this. My school is a dual language school. I found podcasts that help you to learn a second language. Though the podcasts I found were geared toward adults, there might be some for students that I have yet to find.
Having finished my undergraduate degree twenty years ago, new technologies come slower to me than to those people recently out of college who have grown up with computers. My online research of podcasting proves to me that finding out about these new technologies is worth the effort. I can’t wait to try out some of these ideas in my school. Baby steps…
