Podcasts

Podcasts are a thing of the future. Podcasts are like radio stations that anyone can talk on and listen to. No longer do you have to have your own radio station to be heard. Podcasts are spreading like wild fire. If you can use a computer you have access to all these podcasts ranging from news, to education, to sports. Some podcasts are random stuff people do once and some are weekly things that get very popular on itunes. The only thing i worry about is in education teachers and students have access to the same stuff. If a student listens to the same podcasts teachers do about teaching, lesson plans, and etc. then won't the student and teacher be on the same educational level? This is not in a classroom for a student to think they are as amart as the teacher. There is no authority in the classroom if this happens.

I listened to some educational podcasts, one that felt like the news to me, and one about what is going on in photography this week. The educational podcasts range from teaching on the podcasts to talking about teachers and lesson plans. I listened to one called kid casts and it was talking about a program where they take teachers to a place for a week. The teachers went to this workshop to learn new advances in science and they studied some new things in science. At the end of the week the teachers made podcasts to tell about everything. This workshop were supposed to be learning how to open science up to students. This brought the podcast into talking about questions. The Kidcast talked students being scared to ask questions and how if they would just ask everything would go smoother in the learning atmosphere. I thought this podcast was pretty interesting, but i wanted to hear more about the teachers' trip and not about how to ask a question.

Some of the other educational podcasts i listened to made me think about talk radio. I am not a big fan of talk radio, but i listened. One of the podcasts was about parents getting involved in their kids life and getting involved with their schooling. One was about teachers and things they are trying to do with the students and lesson plans. One podcast was actually teaching on it. This podcast was about algebra and it was a complete guide about how to do certain algebra problems. .It even had a screen on it showing you how they solved the problems. At first i thought this podcast was students to learn, but it wasn't. The podcast was to show teachers how to teach students how to do the problems. This was pretty cool for teachers. Other podcasts i watched were one on photography, which talked about photography and the new photoshop stuff. After that i watched macbreak weekly, which they just argued about technology and computers the whole time. It was like talk radio for technology buffs.

The podcasts i watched made it seem like teachers are always striving to come up with new ways to teach, new lessons, new workshops. I am going to be a teacher and i didn't think it was going to be a night and weekend job. From the way podcasts are making teaching look, it seems like very difficult job. I think maybe all this technology might be helping teachers, but maybe it is making teaching harder also. If students can look at the same things teachers can then the students can always be ahead of the teacher. Maybe all this technology like podcasts are undermining teachers and putting students on the same educational level. Teaching cannot be as effective if the student thinks they are smarter than their educator.