Much ado about secondary podcasting

There has been a lot of emphasis on podcasting in primary schools during the 18 months I’ve been travelling the country extolling the virtues of podcasting with Podium.

Clearly the importance of multimodal learning, speaking and listening as well as the renewed primary framework mentioning podcasting as an ICT application are important factors, as well as an undoubtedly more open curriculum in general.

It is easy therefore to overlook just how powerful podcasting can be for any age or subject in secondary schools.

Today I’ve spent a day on a podcasting course with Peter Wrigley and Rachael Large from the Secondary advisory team from Warwickshire’s ICT Development Service.

As usual there were many ideas for different ways that podcasting could be used, including:

• Explaining to children how to logon to the network (a frequent issue at one school)
• Y9 Drama - making a series of adverts to broadcast on a radio show.
• Y8 Shakespeare e.g. ‘Much Ado About Nothing‘
• GCSE French oral role play revision.

In the morning after an initial explanation of the concepts involved, everyone went off to create their own example podcasts using Podium multi-track and/or Audacity.

There was a real discussion about which of the two was more appropriate to use with students. After having used both the consensus was that Podium was the clear winner, although people liked the voice-altering functionality in Audacity as well, for children that are self-conscious when listening to their own voices.

In the afternoon we looked at extending audio recordings by combining them with images in Photo Story 3 to create very sophisticated movies in minutes. Peter especially was anxious to volunteer his time to test our the next planned Podium milestone…. Podium video!