From The Innovative Educator:
In the busy school day of a teacher many feel their schedules don’t allow for the complexities of the equipment and set up necessary for podcasting. But it needn’t be that way. Even the busiest of teachers can get started quickly and easily with just their cell phone. Because of its ease and simplicity, phone casting has become a popular resource in the bag of tricks used by teachers such as Josh Stumpenhorst, Meg Wilson, Lydia Leimbach, and Paul Bogush. They know using the tools students love is a sure fire way to engage 21st century learners.
Phone casting provides the ability to easily create and capture an audio broadcast from your phone that can be published and shared. While the services are ever changing a Google search will provide ideas for a number of free options. Currently iPadio, Voki, and Phonecasting.com are popular options for recording audio from a phone. When you hang up, Wah La! You’ve created a phone cast that can be broadcast to the world. What’s more, many of these services are beginning to allow you to listen to a phone cast from your phone as well. The following is a collection of ideas these educators have implemented to successfully engage learners with phone casting.
Ideas for Teachers to Enrich Instruction with Phone Casting
1) Daily messages on your class blog
Phone casts can be posted directly to your class blog. This is similar to posting a daily message on a class website. This is what 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher Josh Stumpenhorst does for his class in Naperville, IL. He uses phone casts as a way to communicate to parents and students about what he is doing in his classroom. This window into his classroom provides students, their families, and other interested school community members with up to date information about what is being done in class.
Here’s what a phone cast looks like.
2) Capturing mini lessons
Wearing a basic headset that comes with every cell phone, teachers can record unit mini lessons with iPadio. This is a great way for students who were absent to catch up on what the class is doing, for students who need a lesson review, as well as for parents who are wondering, “What did my child learn in school today.” Teachers could even record several mini lessons in advance of a unit and let students flow through at their own pace.
3) Energizing students when they have a sub
When High School Technology Integrator Lydia Leimbach can’t be at her school in Farmingdale, Maine, Voki is in. She creates Vokis to let students know what they need to do in class. In the assignments section of her class web page, she simply creates a Voki for each subject area that day letting students know what they’re expected to do with further directions embedded right on the page.
Not only does this help the sub, it also gets them energized to get to work.
4) Share professional development success
Use phone casting in teacher professional development. Following professional development sessions, participants often complete a survey that only the instructor sees. Instead, turn this into a learning and promotional opportunity for your class. At the end of class, using your telephone as a microphone ask participants to share one thing they are excited about learning and how they plan to incorporate it into their practice. As the phone caster, the facilitator will want to have a catch intro and conclusion, end the call, and a phone cast is made. This can be posted on the facilitator’s online space with the course materials for others to listen to.
5) Discretely provide accommodations for students with special needs
Educators who have students with special needs know that in some cases students have accommodations for some of their students such as extended time, or having parts of the test read to them. In the past this has caused somewhat of a disruption either requiring the student to be removed from the class and a school staff member removed from their regular responsibilities to read to them, or in some cases the teacher and student sit in the back of the class as the teacher tries to read quietly to the student as the rest of the class hears this going on. Not only is this disruptive to the teacher’s schedule, it can also be embarrassing to the the students. In Meg Wilson’s class podcasting has changed the game. Staff is no longer required to be removed from their duties, and students are no longer singled out. Meg reads the student passage and creates a podcast for the student. During the test any student with this accommodation is given unobtrusive ear buds and a mobile device to listen to the passage. In today’s digital age, testing companies should be required to provide such accommodations, but until then, we have teachers like Meg.
See more at: http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2010/12/ten-ideas-for-educating-innovatively.html
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