Prompt 5

Reading Prompt #5
•RICHARDSON Ch. 8. Podcasting, Video and Screencasting, Live Streaming: Multimedia Publishing for the Masses
•BLACKBOARD - McQuillan, J. (2006). iPods in Education: The Potential for Language Acquisition
•BLACKBOARD – Stansbury, M. (2009). iPods help ESL Students Achieve Success. eSchool News (May 11).

Do you have an iPod or another type of .mp3 player? If so, have you used it or anything other than listening to your own music, such as downloading and listening to podcasts? Note some of the points McQuillan made about how podcasting can support second language learning. Which of the ideas from the readings would you be interested in trying out in your own classroom?
I have iPod as well as mp3, besides listening to the music; I also use them as “flash drive”, such as saving my pictures and documents. Unfortunately, I have never used them to download and listen to podcasts. I was not familiar with podcast until I read Richardson’s introduction, I really think this technology can be used to teach ESL students.

McQuillan mentions that iPods’ “audio recording” function allows students to record and publish “audio diary”, or record audio part of a slideshow, etc., these ideas are great. Students have opportunities to demonstrate their oral proficiency to the teacher who can download their published “speech samples”, or can listen to teacher or classmates’ speech samples. Also students can podcast their presentations with audio on the iPod; not only teachers but also parents can also view student’s progress. All these will stimulate students’ interests of learning language(s), provide them with more practice opportunities, and achieve academic success.

I really like the idea of “podcasting”, I remember when I was learning English, I tried to find all kinds of listening materials, such as VOA, or BBC, unfortunately, podcasting was not existed at that time, I have to spent a lot of money to buy these tapes or CDs. But now we have podcast, and lots of them are free, I will definitely use it in my classroom!