Podcasting

When I go back in time and remember my language learning, I realize it was quite a boring experience. It entailed doing the same thing all the time - reading, retelling, memorizing words and grammar rules, practicing by means of non-meaningful exercises. We did not do any listening activities, little speaking was involved in classroom activities. Now, with this in mind, I look at the present opportunities that the learners have and I am happy that I will at least be able to use the actual technological tools as an EFL teacher.

Today I will write about podcasting and its effectiveness.As Christopher Shamburg states in his interview, podcasting helps to repackage boring classes. It really does... Podcasts are so so great! Why? Well, first because podcasting provides students access to authentic listening materials. It is like a radio broadcast. The difference is that you can pause and replay the recording any time and you can find a recording on any topic you want thanks to RSS feeds. Besides, now it has become very easy to create your own podcast by recording yourself. Sometimes you need to have some specific content for your students and creating your own podcast can save you in that situation. We should not forget as well that students can also create their own podcasts. Jeff Mehring used this tool very effectively in his integrative course (http://moodle.aua.am/file.php/28/Course_Materials/Podcasting/ESLEFLpodcastingActivities_Mehring.pdf). One of the activities created by him asked students to create a recipe via podcasts and then other students would critique the recipe in the same manner. Well, this is such a good idea! It is so authentic, so meaningful, so much more motivating for students. It develops students' listening and speaking skills in a very natural way.

 As an EFL teacher, I am certainly going to use podcasts in different ways and for different topics. For instance, students could listen to one or more podcasts and reflect on what they heard by recording themselves. I would assign students roles and ask them to interview each other via podcast. There are so many activities that we can do using this tool. There are so many topics that we can address, like legal and ethical questions of intellectual property as Shamburg did, or the life of koalas in Australian forests, and so on and so forth. Actually, podcasts could help learners to be multidisciplinary.

Another trend that makes me very happy is that, with these digital media tools, we can finally pay attention to developing all the four skills equally without any discrimination. One important thing to keep in mind is that the teacher should not forget about pedagogical objectives when using podcasts. He/she should clearly imagine what it is going to teach his/her students and how. 

I consider myself a teacher who is always open for new ideas from which, as I believe, my students will benefit.