Podcasting is a term that refers to downloadable audio or video over the internet. The word "podcast" is derived from combination of "pod" from iPod and "cast" from the word broadcast and was first used by Ben Hammersley, a British internet technologist, at his columm in the Guardian newspaper in 2004. It has become so popular in the USA that the podcast audiences have increased in numbers for the past few years (According to the assumption by emarketers, there will be 3.7 people downloading podcasting in 2013 and it was around 17,4 million according to the 2008 figure).
What benefits does podcasting provide for in education, especially in language learning?
1) It provides accessible practice for language learning. Students can listen to the material outside the class or at their leisure times and they continue to learn out of the classroom environement through podcasting.
2) It is authentic. That is, it provides real input to practise language learning.
3) It helps students to develop oral and comprehension skills (Ducate & Lomicka, 2009) and facilitates self-paced learning.
4) It builds a sense of community sharing and learning from others.
5) It offers richer learning environment for students with different learning styles.
There is a tutorial showing how you can create podcasting using the software Audacity, which is a digital audio editor program. There are a lot of free software to enable people (teachers and students) to create podcasting. Some of them are propaganda, evoca and podcastpeople.
Before getting started, here are some tips for you:
- Write the script first, and provide students with the script,
- State your goals clearly at the beginning and review these goals at the end of the podcast,
- Normalize and balance the sound quality,
- Insert dialogs, images and videos to add variety of input and avoid the monotone sound.
Some useful links for language teachers:
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