One type of podcast to consider is the educational podcast. This sort of podcast is usually spoken and may consist either solely of audio or of both audio and video. Though any podcast can be considered informative in some sense, educational podcasts have education as a more or less exclusive focus. These podcasts may even begin as recordings that are made in actual classrooms. The following are some ideas and tips for creating an educational podcast:
Classroom Lectures
One way of going about creating an educational podcast is simply to record classroom lectures. This must, of course, be done with the permission of your instructor. Bring along some kind of digital recorder to class and set up to record your professor as he or she lectures. Be sure and test out the microphone beforehand with your teacher walking around the room to make sure that it adequately records him or her. Then simply record lectures and make them available online sequentially as weekly podcasts. You will, of course, only want to record the lectures of teachers whose lectures you find particularly stimulating.
Book Discussions
Book discussions are another podcast idea that can be very effective in sequential fashion. These are often done in both high school and college classrooms as well. Students will read a particular book and then address the class as to what the book is about and what their opinion of the work is. These book discussions can be recorded as students make their presentations and then the results can be podcasted. Alternatively, the podcaster can simply read book and review them one by one, forming the content of the podcasts.
Science logs are essentially notes that are made in sonic form while someone is performing science experiments or investigations of one sort of another. These investigations may take the form of ecologically oriented nature walks, chemistry experiments, sociological observation sessions, psychological interviews or discussions, physics thought experiments, and so on. Perhaps create an introduction that describes the science investigation in question, followed by the spoken log notes, and finishing with a conclusion.
For example, if you want to do something related to oil such as Eagle Ford Shale, then the science logs could be a great way.
Meet the Author
Meet the author segments may either feature interviews with an actual author of a published work or may be presentations given by students in classrooms regarding a certain author. Rather than focusing on a particular book, these types of podcasts focus on the author him or herself. It might examine the author’s life, influences, and several works by them. These types of podcasts thus give information about an author as well as about the topics he or she is writing about and are thus very informative and interesting.
Art and Music Critiques
Art or music critiques can be created in many different ways – wandering through museums and describing and talking into a voice recorder while critiquing paintings and sculptures, getting a group of artists or art students together to mutually critique each other’s work and recording it, listening to music and recording critiques made of it, interviewing a painter or a musician and then critiquing their work afterwards, recording art or music class critiques, and so on. You can try critiquing everything from ancient artwork to recent and modern work.
Educational podcasts are a great way to have fun making podcasts and learn a lot at the same time.
Originally posted on October 23, 2011 @ 8:36 am