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| Wednesday, March 21, 2007 |
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AACT- EFFECTIVELY ENGAGED IN ESCHOOL PODCASTING
By AACT Editor @ 12:01 PM :: 284 Views :: AACT
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Podcasting and Creative Audio is an English elective that uses audio editing and audio files as the texts of the class. This semester, AACT students are learning digital audio editing, participating in the course podcast, and then designing and running their own podcasts. The projects for the course include media reviews, audio tours, interviews, and news stories as well as student-designed projects.
Podcasting not only gives students an audience for their class work, but teaches them technical and language skills that they will need to successfully participate in the digital world. What's exciting about podcasting as an English class is that kids are not only learning new literacies of digital audio, but they are building on the traditional literacies as they read, write, rehearse, speak, and collaborate.
Podcasting mirrors past trends in technology. Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of professionals such as writers and executive secretaries knew word processing, but today most of us couldn't function without it. The same will be true of audio and video editing. It's already been a popular technology for advertisers, comedians, musicians, politicians, real estate brokers, entrepreneurs, and dozens of other professions that were never previously associated with audio.
One of the goals of the course is for students to continue with their podcasts after the course is over. Not only does the course focus on the tools to create and publish high quality content, but it also focuses on the technologies to share and market the feeds and the legal and ethical issues associated with podcasting.
Podcasting is part of a larger empowering trend in communication and society. Digital technology and the Internet can give people the power to create and distribute media that was only available to a handful of large broadcasters ten years ago. Teaching students how to do it in effective, interesting, and responsible ways seems like important work for English teachers and schools.
Dr. Christopher Shamburg, who wrote and teaches the course, was an English teacher at County Prep for 10 years. He has his Bachelors and Masters degrees in English Literature from Rutgers and his doctorate in Educational Technology from Columbia. He now teaches in the Graduate Program in Educational Technology at New Jersey City University. He has won several teaching awards and written and presented on technology and the high school English class. He is the coauthor of Teachers as Technology Leaders (2006) and the author of Technology in the High School English Class (Upcoming, September 2007). Both books are published by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the world's leading organization in educational technology.
To subscribe to the course podcast on iTunes, search for Podcourse or subscribe directly to the feed in an RSS aggregator (http://feeds.feedburner.com/podcourse/). To get the feeds for the student podcasts, go to http://podcourse.blogspot.com. The feeds will be posted when they are available.
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