1. Ms. Edmison’s Weekly Podcast gave me the idea of using podcasting as a way to communicate news and upcoming events with parents at the end of each week. Ms. Edmison’s class uses its podcast as its weekly newsletter, and I love how that idea puts responsibility and creativity into the students’ hands. I wonder how much preparation Ms. Edmison has to do to get her podcast up and running each year.

2. We study early American exploration and colonization as part of our social studies curriculum, and I was thinking that it might be fun for my students to create podcasts from the the perspectives of different Spanish conquistadors and other European explorers. By taking on the role of various historical personalities, the students would be enhancing their knowledge of the content, sharing their ideas with others, and allowing me as the teacher to assess their understandings and dig deeper into their interpretations.

3. In a previous post, I commented on an idea I had for incorporating flickr into classroom teaching. My idea involved having students collect images of any misspellings they come across out in the world. Enhanced podcasts sharing several if not all the images they find through the year with commentary on the significance of the collections could make an interesting podcast…maybe a final podcast project?

I found evoca to be quick and easy to use. I had no trouble getting the html code needed to embed the recording into my blog, and I like the way the embedded file looks on the page. I really like how evoca provides the rss feed for the podcasts I create under my username. One thing I thought was really neat about evoca would be a handy tool for skype users. Skype users can record calls and have the recordings sent directly to evoca accounts! I can definitely see how this would be a useful tool for teachers like Ms. Edmison who create weekly podcasts with their students.

Before reading through the podcasting information listed on the K12 Learning wiki, my search for educational podcasts was limited to the Education Podcast Network, NPR, and iTunes. To be honest, I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the variety of podcasts available for elementary age students; they are either too long, too short, too advanced, or too juvenile. I find this is especially true on iTunes. If you have had better success with iTunes than I have, I’d love your suggestions for my new class of fourth-graders in the fall. Now I’m happy to have added Learn Out Loud and PBS to my delicious page, hopefully to meet my future podcasting needs.

I watched a CNN Student News’ “Young People Who Rock” video podcast. I got lucky and found that this recent episode featured Zac Sunderland, a 16 year-old who is attempting to break a world record by sailing all the way around the world..alone. I was thinking that this news story would be the perfect introduction to the chapter in our textbook about Ferdinand Magellan and his circumnavigation of the globe. We might compare Zac’s route to Magellan’s, and we might discuss the similarities between the two journeys. What a cool way to make the social studies content more applicable to kids! I was unable to grab a feed for the actual video of Zac’s interview on CNN, but I did subscribe to the blog that accompanies this featured CNN coverage.