The Power of Podcasting

Every time I feel happy witnessing so many powerful mediums of digital media. Along with blogging and microblogging, podcasting presents another powerful e-learning tool. Podcasting is powerful and accessible,    

  it has low barriers to entry, you just need a microphone and you have to search communication to create the power.

Podcasts are helpful in motivating kids and helping them to stay focused on the course. Podcasts give the opportunity to meaningfully participate in culture and society, not just in the classroom, but in the world. Learning from podcasts shifted control over the pacing of learning activities from the teacher into their own hands. Students identified podcasts as offering choices of how they could carry out their learning activities and flexibility to organize their learning. Podcasts have also the potential of tapping into the knowledge of peers and other students as a valuable learning resource.   

It gives the students the chance to record themselves and then they are able to immediately listen to their pronunciation, intonation and grammar usage. They can also record native speakers and practice mimicking intonation and pronunciation. It is also a very useful tool for students who are too shy to speak the foreign language in front of their peers. Therefore, the above mentioned are the evidence that podcasting has a huge potential to teach students.

As kids are becoming simultaneously consumers and creators of digital media, we have to teach them skills to how effectively use and benefit from podcasting. The activities discussed in the article can be applied in the classroom environment. Teacher must raise students’ awareness about podcasting and introduce the students its functions and the steps of creating a podcast.  Students must practice it at home to become used to it. Downloading Audacity to all the computers and having the webpage or weblog up and running will ensure that the activities will work and can be implemented in EFL classroom.