"Podcasting" and Digital Recording for Pedagogical Purposes
Kristen Sullivan
Kristen Sullivan uses podcasting for the enhancement of oral skill development through the creation of student-authored podcasts as an authentic, creative activity with a positive motivational effect. While podcasting in the classroom is appealing as a technological route to educational benefit, careful consideration must be made of how to apply it; teachers must clearly identify their course goals. Students' social and interactional needs and common challenges associated with group project work must also be kept in mind when designing and implementing podcast projects.
Sullivan exploits the podcasting process of plan/practice, record/edit, broadcast and listen/feedback for pedagogical processes, repeated several times, to support a consciousness-raising, reflective approach to engaging with spoken English in a supportive classroom environment.
After polling her audience to determine the extent of our experience with podcasting, Sullivan, who has been studying a foreign language (Japanese) herself since junior high school, gave us her rationale and procedure for making a lot more listening materials available on-line than there had been for her, showing how the challenge of making something that people will listen to helps students get satisfaction from doing something authentic using English.
Sullivan's goals for Oral Communication classes of getting students to talk, keeping them on-task and attending to fluency and pronunciation would seem to be well met by this project. Her presentation was very useful in bringing the technologically-challenged among us up to speed on exploiting equipment that is very much a part of most of our students' lives.
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