Podcasts

Podcasting. I was still teaching English overseas when I first heard that word in 2008 and, I must admit now, I had no idea of what a podcast was or how useful they could be. Through a stroke of luck, however, I was able to gain knowledge about podcasting that same year from a fellow teacher that was employed at the school as I was. It was through her that I was able to make sense of the fundamental usefulness of the podcast as well as discovered my first podcast, about using smart technology to teach ESL to South Korean students. I was immediately taken with this new technology. Since that time my knowledge of the history of podcasting has grown along since with my knowledge of how to create them. Over the years since then, I have discovered podcasts that pertain to all of the my hobbies and also create a few new key hobbies too. However, before my class on this very topic I had created just one podcast that was meant to fulfill a requirement for a Masters-level class I took during the Spring semester of classes at Nazareth College. As a result of the work I did on my podcast, which had as its main focus a short narrative of the life of the first king of the Tudor dynasty, King Henry VII, I feel that the podcast is the most important and useful technology for delivering knowledge to students since the creation of the blog.

The benefits of using iPads in the classroom

     While this blog will look at the use of iPads in the classroom, it will not talk about the use of iPads to teach English to English language learners, since that topic has already been covered. Instead, this blog will focus on the overall value that the iPad has when used in the classroom. 

     For our class we were required to go through the Apple iStore and download free apps that could be beneficial to new students and evaluate their usefulness. Even though it is a new technology, I believe that the applications of the iPad can be used within each class that a student is required to take as part of their curriculum, because the iPad gives students the opportunity for self-learning. When I was working as a teacher in South Korea last year, I found it important to specifically emphasize the use of the iPad as a credible teaching instrument because it helped to develop a student’s skills for the better while helping them meet the demands of their content area. Having knowledge about how each specific iPad application found on the Apple iStore is distinctive and how these apps can both define and influence the amount of knowledge students build for themselves is knowledge that all educators must know.

     When I downloaded apps for my own iPad there were five categories that I focused all of my attention on, and these were: art, tesol, history, science, and math. The applications that I chose to download to my own personal device were the Phrasal Verb Machine, History Line, Starwalk - 5 Stars Astronomy Guide, Louvre: 20 Must-See Masterpieces at Musee de Louvre, and Math Kid. Letting the students use these reliable, high quality apps to access the content that they learned in the classroom is fundamentally necessary because it helps them review what they learned in a classroom lesson.