Podcast

Powell, P. (2011). How To Use Podcasts To Build Your Brand & Expand Your Audience. Retrieved at https://www.getinvolved.ca/2011/06/how-to-use-podcasts-to-build-your-brand-expand-your-audience/. 

Podcasts or screencasts are effective tools for both learners and teachers. On the learner end, users can use podcasts as a verbal blog and share their learning and opinions with other students. This can lead to thought-provoking discussion, much like on blog commenting areas, but adds the extra touch of a real human voice! Students can also use podcasts to keep track of information they learn throughout the course, so that they can go back to it afterwards and review everything they have learned as they talked about in their podcast. This can add to digital literacy by allowing for another dimension of communication online (verbal), and can contribute to digital citizenship by improving the ability for effective digital communication. However, the same digital responsibility rules apply for podcast and screencast - we must make sure to properly cite any information we create or get from a podcast, and we especially need to make sure we accurately cite when we embed others' podcasts. On the teachers' end, podcasts can allow them to teach "through the internet" and provide lectures to students that they can decide when to listen to. This way, the same information that they provide in lectures can reach many more students, and students will not have an excuse to miss a week's lecture content! Educators can also reduce costs needed for running large classes. For example, PSYC1F90 at Brock University is a course that a significant number of people take and always needs to run at least 2 separate lectures a week. If the lecture format was turned into a podcasts, the professor would not need to lecture twice weekly, and first year students will be able to access these lectures anytime during the week without having to wake up, for example, at 8 a.m. on a Monday. The same can be said of many popular first year courses - taking advantage of podcasts is just the most efficient and economically wise thing to do.