Wikis and Podcasts

Yesterday I collected information and educational examples of wikis. The pedagogical value of wikis seems to be a "no-brainer" to me. There are so many ways in which they can be used effectively to improve student learning and, more specifically, student writing. Podcasts also have almost limitless value as they can take any lesson, concept, or portion of a lesson and make it available to students on demand for a first look or review.

Creating and publishing podcasts are not as transparent as working with wikis. Subscribing to them using iTunes is easy, but teachers will want to make their own podcasts and screencasts. That process is a bit trickier. If you have a Mac with iLife 06 and GarageBand 3, you are all set. If you live in the Windows world, you need a program such as Audacity with the LAME plugin to export your audio recording as an MP3 file. It does not support the new richer audio/video formats such as AAC and MPEG4a so displaying slides or screencasts must be done differently. finding a place for your podcast is also not trivial. One will find the iTunes Store and several other public sites for storing media to be available, but the process of uploading a file seems a bit involved for most teachers. I'm still learning about how to work with podcasts and using RSS feeds to publish and receive them. I see the potential, but now must figure out how to make it easy for teachers to use.