Can podcasts enhance/support your classroom instruction? What are the benefits and barriers?

Podcasts can definitely enhance and support your classroom instruction, especially if the teacher is assigning podcasts for homework. Podcasts can be used for flip teaching, where students get the instruction at home and then do the assignments in class with the teacher. They can cut back on classroom instruction time, but a barrier is that students cannot ask their teacher questions while watching the podcast and may forget to do so the next day. Podcasts also offer a lot of creative opportunities for students and teachers. Enhanced Podcasting  described Social Studies projects where students develop radio broadcasts and cover many different topics of a time period and have pictures and graphs supporting their topic. One barrier is that using podcast rather than having students practice public speaking may create several disadvantages for students. Public speaking, for example at a poetry slam, builds character, confidence, and a sense of community support that may not be as powerful when done with a podcast.

TEDxPhilly – Chris Lehmann- Education is broken

This was an amazing video. I felt very moved by the concepts Chris Lehmann shared. He is correct in that this is how we should be teaching our students. We should encourage them to do things they are good at and teach for passion, joy and interest rather than testing them to death to make sure that they “don’t suck so much at the things they are bad at”. Chris Lehmann posed many questions that I found very interesting, particularly, why are you in a class if you don’t need it? I ask myself this question regularly about the content being taught in my elementary school. When students ask this question, I don’t have an answer for them. I liked what Lehmann said about how school should be teaching us how to learn, how to think critically, and how to live. I also really liked that he talked about Bill Gates and how he’s not qualified to tell teachers what or how they should be teaching. I agree that teaching students skills that they will need in the 21^st century job market is important, but this should not be our aim. Lehmann gave so many inspiring examples of how students at his school are engaging in activities that are a reflection of themselves as individuals that have something to offer and teach us about. Giving students the freedom to figure things out on their own, motivates them and gets them invested in what they are learning about. I really enjoyed what Lehmann had to say, but how do we do it now that we have identified the problem? What about NCLB? What about standardized testing? How do we eliminate this from the priority list of our school systems?