Podcasting

IPod and Broadcasting! These two concepts were quite familiar to me, but the combination of these words was something new and absorbing.

Podcasting – “learning through doing"! Podcasting is considered to be a shift in learning, which enables us:

·        to access course content on a twenty-four-hour basis

·        to take the learning mobile so that listening can be done on the bus, at the gym, or on a walk between classes

·        to develop creativity and flexibility

·        to download podcasts from the Internet for free

Moreover, as Manning (2005) mentions, voice humanizes and personalizes, it lessens the heavy text burdened of a computer screen, and helps the listener connect with the speaker. Podcasts can help elicit comments and continue a discussion that may have begun in the classroom, or began in a podcast and continues in the classroom. Besides, a person can talk about something of interest, make it an audio file and then post the file on the Internet making it available for others to listen to. In this way by listening to the content, instead of reading it, students can develop their aural skill outside of the classroom and also they can improve their pronunciation. It’s not a secret that whatever is new, it captures out attention and raises the motivation. Hence, today podcasting became a vital tool for both teachers/professors and students to enhance their learning and study skills via this new technology. Different researches show that podcasting enriches the learning, it stimulates students’ interest in the subject and it is helpful in motivating the students and helping them to stay focused on the course.

After reading several articles on podcasting I realized that I missed something important in my learning so far, because none of my teachers and professors at school and previous university ever implemented technology in our boring classes. But today I understood how essential podcasting and other type of software could be in my overall language learning process.