Blog Reflection 6

I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how exactly to create a podcast. I eventually went with what seemed easiest. My undergraduate degree in political science and international studies has not blessed me with the greatest of technological acumen. Those friends of mine who studied computer science on the other hand are doing quite well for themselves. Then again, some of them also have no idea where most of the 183 states on this earth are. Nor do they have an iota of understanding of what factors affect those people. Even though in today's society, my credentials seem to amount to very little, I can live with the decisions I have made in life. One of those decisions was to use Jing, the free version which allows for limited data memory and a podcast of no more than four and a half minutes. When thinking about what to do for the podcast, I thought of what I had to do in order to apply for a position in Korea teaching English. I have already taught at a high school there and decided to show a sample of what my lessons then looked like. As I have been directly told, power point presentations are no longer considered technologically acceptable in the classroom. They are outdated. I wish I had known this before I spent countless hours compiling photos, translating vocabulary words and creating some sense of continuity within my lessons. I was able to touch very lightly on the style I taught. My lessons were meant to be an hour long. My lessons were also designed to reach out for student interaction. I viewed it better to have an endless barrage of questions ready rather than to have a lecture that ran out of time leaving me in a spot where all I could do was wing something. I have had the unique opportunity of seeing what podcasts are being used to do, and unfortunately for someone who has devoted nine years of his life to teaching ESL, I saw podcasts as my fellow teachers' replacement. I worked for a Spanish company that designed a platform for primarily Spanish speakers to interact with target languages. They watched videos and listened to audio recordings and then recorded their own responses. My job was to help students with any technical problems and while being on call corrected their responses. Here is the catch. No more than 10 minutes was allowed for each assessment no matter how many mistakes the students made. Regardless of how egregious the errors were, I was instructed to pick three mistakes, explain why they were mistakes and then move on. To someone who is going to be a teacher partially due to the great respect I have for my former teachers, this was an absolute betrayal. If I wrote something with a feeling that it was wrong, but received no red marks, I took it that I had done well. This was not the case for many of my former employer's clients. The article written by Ashley Deal comes right out and says there is no substantial literature that supports whether podcasting is beneficial or not. There is a lengthy explanation about how easy it is to subscribe and how much time it saves once the initial setup has been established, but one part of the paper grabbed my attention. That was that students felt annoyed by the extra work load which then perceived as something that should have been done in the class. As I am getting certified to teach high school social studies and will probably take this and move abroad to continue with my ESL career, I see two things happening. If I were to stay in the states, then the first thing in my mind is that I remember it being difficult enough to get students to read their assigned reading. How I am going to convince my students to not only continue reading, which I hope will continue to be a part of organized education, but also to watch podcasts of more information that most teenagers find dull and at best annoying is beyond me. The report states with surprise that students studied to ascertain their responsiveness to podcasts typically viewed the podcasts from their computers instead of their remote devices. I am sorry, but while running, exercising, and especially driving, I do not want to listen to lecture notes. Driving is dangerous enough. Is it possible that one day we will accept that focusing on one task at a time may save lives? Just this morning I drove past a lady whose scooter had been hit. She was convulsing on the ground as the ambulance arrived. I know this is conjecture, but I assume the driver was probably making use of her smartphone at the moment of impact. The never-ending search for convenience is the prime suspect in why the health of the nation looks as dismally as it does. I went to college when students were often more concerned with partying and nursing hangovers than attending class. The article points out that by allowing all lectures to be watched from wherever and whenever, that it is possible that something negative is being done to the fostering of prioritization, organization, discipline and personal responsibility. I sincerely hope that podcasts do not replace textbooks, and other required readings, but as most of us know from the existence of sparknotes, many students will inevitably take the easy way out. Then, students will complain about how teachers did not create sufficient podcasts, never mind that there is some responsibility on the part of the students to, I would say, work. The article briefly mentions in passing that a considerable amount of time goes into creating the podcasts. Of course, after the initial phase, this becomes much easier, and the lessons are their to be used indefinitely. I also believe that teachers become better at what they do over time and any good teacher would feel the need to edit their lessons. So the idea of it being less time-consuming is a bit ambiguous. One positive concerning podcasts is that it allows teachers to focus more on projects and that by having the students watch lectures prior to class, which as most teachers know is like praying for rain in a desert, they can devote more time to student-centered learning. The fact that their was a 10% higher average on project grades goes without saying. They had more time to do it in class. Another positive that the article uses that raises red flags is that students believed that using podcasts was "the most realistic and practical class they had taken as undergraduates". As an undergraduate, I took almost everything my esteemed professors told me for granted. The article even states that there is no research to back up this statement. The biggest problem I see with using this technology is what is explained as product-driven development and working backwards to use technology for the sake of using technology. I have already given my opinion on this at great length and am at least happy to see proponents show some honesty in conceding this very significant fact. We still do not know what benefits using the podcasts will bring. As I have said this is how I percieve podcasts within the context of high school social studies. If we look at foreign language studies, I have a different stance. I think that this provides an unbelievably positive tool to learn languages. On the other hand I do not believe in dislocating students from the teacher. We are still social animals, and no matter how much technophiles tout Web 2.0 as just as good as human interaction, without the gaze of a concerned human being, I believe the over-reliance of technology cheapens education and its merits are slogans yelled in the prime desire simply to make money.