Blog Post #4

1st Graders Create Their Own Read-Along Audiobook!
The first post I chose to read on podcasting was Langwitches, 1st Graders Create Their Own Read-Along Audiobook. This was a great post to begin helping me understand the importance of podcasting. It is amazing to see such young students as first graders creating new fun ways to learn through audiobooks. Each student was given the chance to record their voices in the process of taking over reading and writing a script in the classroom. Langwitch's blog stated that she gathered the recordings of each child and put them together to create a podcast. After reading and seeing the process of the 1st graders podcast being made, I realized podcasting is a very creative way to allow children to develop excitement about reading and writing. The students are also building their listening skills in the process of podcasting by anticipating hearing their individual recorded pieces. I loved seeing how the students were able to follow the podcast with their finger in the audiobook the teacher helped to make. I felt by having a visual book for the children to follow along in really helped to interest the children more in podcasting.

The second source I chose to look into was Langwitch's Listening-Comprehension Podcasting post. This particular post was all about developing and instilling language into the human mind. Langwitch's blog stated that in order to fully internalize new vocabulary words, an individual must actually hear the word or words atleast 70 times! I thought this was a very interesting fact and shows just how important repetition in the spoken language really can be. When learning new vocabulary, it is also important to relate the new word to a feeling or moment in time to think about when seeing or hearing the given word. By relating words to certain feelings or events, a person may find it easier to instill the vocabulary in their mind.

I decided to watch a video for my third source entitled "Benefits of Podcasting in the Classroom". The video by Joe Dale gave many great reasons on why to use podcasting in the classrooms. He started out by stating just how much the present generation of students depend on technology and that by introducing podcasting into the classroom teachers are more easily able to interest the students. Podcasting is a project based learning approach that brings differentiation into the classrooms for those students that cannot learn from just paper and pencil alone. By allowing students to create podcasts, you as a teacher are helping the student build their creativity skills as well as requiring students to build a higher order of thinking process. One main factor of podcasting that I found beneficial was the availability to absent students. There are so many reason why students miss school and what better way to keep the student from getting behind on their work than creating podcasts. By the creation of podcast, the teacher is able to send the entire lesson to the absent students if necessary. I feel the technique of podcasting could extremely help out many students that struggle to learn in other ways.