I think that podcasts are great tools to be used in the classroom; they have so many uses that can really assist a teacher in teaching the student of today. Podcasts can be used to record a lecture that can then be posted to your classroom blog; lecture recordings are great tools for students who had to miss class for an emergency (or for other non-emergency reasons) or for students who need that extra time to listen to the lecture and take more thorough notes. Podcasts can also be used for assignment purposes, where the students make a recording of something (perhaps a president's biography) and then the class must listen to 3 or 4 of the podcasts and answer questions regarding what they heard. Podcasts could also be handy in recording school music recitals that could be posted or played on a school website or web blog. One important note that I really liked in this chapter was the following, "Before you get your students podcasting, I would urge you to try it out first...You need to experience what you are asking your students to do"(pg. 117). I feel that it is very important that before we go assigning our students to do something involving technology, we should be a least a little bit familiar with the capabilities and processes involved. I like that in this class we are getting so many opportunities to try out different forms of technology, and get to know them, so that if we wanted to use them in our classrooms we would have some familiarity with them.
Similar to podcasting, video publishing is another tool to consider using in a classroom setting. I don't think that I would use video publishing all too often, but I think that it would be a handy tool to use for a project or two each year (in the late elementary years). I think that students would really enjoy making a video about some concept or historical event that they are learning about; videos will most likely insprie students to get involved and learn about the material so that they will know what they are talking about in the video.
The last topic discussed in this chapter was screencasts. I think that screencasts are really amazing information/help systems. Screencasts could be used in an educational setting to explain how to do a computer-related assignment or any other computer-related function in the classroom. I think that screencasts are really ingenuitive; they can be very helpful in a classroom to help walk students through a process, step-by-step. I think that screencasts could be very useful at the beginning of the school year to explain how to set up a blog or to explain how to find everything on the school web blog.
As a future teacher, I hope to motivate my students and get them excited to learn by integrating the use of technology in my classroom. I think that I would use podcasts and screencasts as devices that would assist my students in understanding assignments. I would try to post lecture-type podcasts to my classroom blog, so that students could listen to them later, if they wanted to. I would also consider having projects for my students to do that would involve either making a podcast or a video of a particular topic we were learning about.
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