iPods and Podcasts: You Can't Touch This!!!

For me this was a timely exercise as I just purchased a 16 Gigabyte iPod Touch and, I gotta say, I absolutely love it! Why is this relevant you ask? Because students have iPods and/or phones to listen to audio or watch video with. Though these aren't necessary for podcasting, it is a likely avenue for students and one of the reasons I bought my iPod...or at least that's what I tell my Dean.

Indulge me for a moment on a bit of a sidebar. I was looking for a replacement for my PDA. One of my colleagues, let's call her "Mary", had just got one and showed me the interface. WOW!!! Flipping through screens with the flick of a finger, calendar, mail, browser, music, video, games, looks REALLY COOL, and, drum roll...wireless. A poor man's Blackberry! I was still, however, unconvinced as I had always thought iPods were just for music and had really good TV commercials. Wrong!!! My next encounter with the new iPod Touch was at a meeting. I sat between two colleagues who, in the middle of the meeting, pull out their Touch's and start reading e-mail, browsing the web and doing engineering calculations. That's it...GOTTA HAVE IT!!! The geek in me was salivating and I was no longer paying attention to the meeting. Oh well.

Flash a month ahead to today. I now have one of these shiny little trinkets and, thanks to this week's activity, have discovered yet another way to use up every spare minute of my life. Yes, that's right, I now watch podcasts of some of my favourite shows. The really cool part is that iTunes looks after everything for me. Once I watch an episode, it fetches another one for me. Thusfar (since yesterday) I have only explored TV shows that I am familiar with like Discovery Channel's "Dirty Jobs". I did notice tons of other free stuff. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that a lot of this stuff is FREE!!! Good thing as I am too cheap to pay for it!

I have had a bit of experience with recording the audio portion of my lectures (using Audacity - much easier than it sounds) and posting them to Blackboard. I have also recorded screen capture movies (as I discussed on the wiki for this program). Technically speaking, this is not podcasting as there is no RSS component to push the new podcasts to the students. And therein lies the beauty of podcasting: having a piece of software retrieve the files for you.

So, what are my plans with regards to using podcasting in my teaching? I am undecided. I have always been a BIG proponent of making students come to class. Because of my discipline (Engineering), I feel it necessary to have them treat their education like a job. (We are mandated to teach them professional skills.) You show up on time, submit work on time, etc., etc. Making podcasts available makes it easy for them to not attend. In the past my solution has been to have mandatory attendance but made the lectures available for review. Students didn't use it much...they had already heard the lecture. This past year, however, I found a new use for podcasts, or Vodcasts as they are sometimes called when they involve video. I experimented with posting the videos I mentionned earlier to create some more learning opportunities for students and effectiely increase the amount of classtime that I had with them. This afforded me more time to push my content in class while providing them with more example problems. In addition to getting them off my back about doing more examples, they can watch the video as many times as they like. Win-win!

Final verdict: I will definitely be using more of this technology in the coming school year to supplement my lectures. I read the article from this week's activity about how to create the RSS for the podcast and it's a bit dicey but it looks like there are tools to do the work for me. Full steam ahead!

Thanks for reading.