Podcasts are useful in the classroom, but how can I use them? Check out these free resources!

By: Kate Bishop-Williams and Doug Parsons

We recently told you about all of the reasons to use a podcast in your classroom: they are engaging, free, and great sources of information! But, you might be left wondering, how do I actually use these podcasts in my classroom?

Podcasts can serve a variety of purposes in educational settings, in place of readings and background materials for lessons and discussions, as part of a case study, or as the basis of an assignment. However, the use of podcasts in classrooms is relatively limited to date.

But, we hope to help educators with that! We have launched a series of classroom discussion guides and an assignment outline for using podcasts either formally or informally in classroom settings. We call this project #PodcastsInTheClassroom, and we aim to facilitate the use of podcasts in classrooms by providing open educational resources.

The guides are available here. There are three guides covering topics on climate change skepticism, climate change related sea level rise impacts on the law, and climate change impacts on health. Each guide provides a series of questions about the episode that are open ended and that encourage students to think deeply and reflexively about the content they have listened to. The questions could be used to generate classroom discussion or as the basis of short writing assignments.

However you choose to use them, they are meant to encourage students to engage with the informative content in the podcast episode and apply it to their own learning.

These three discussion guides and the assignment guide are just the beginning for #PodcastsInTheClassroom though! We are seeking feedback on these exemplar guides so that we know what works for educators and what doesn’t. We’ll take that feedback and use it to modify and improve the existing guides, as well as begin to generate additional discussion guides for future episodes. We invite you to share your feedback with us via one of these options:

1. By email to Kate Bishop-Williams (kbishop@uoguelph.ca) or Doug Parsons (americaadapts@gmail.com).
2. On Twitter to Kate (@kbishopwilliams) or Doug (@usaadapts) using the hashtag #PodcastsInTheClassroom.
3. Via a more detailed survey, available here.

Now that you have a resource at your fingertips for using podcasts in your classroom, it is time to give it a try! Use any of the options above or leave a comment below to tell us how you are using podcasts in your classroom and what additional resources would help you to use more #PodcastsInTheClassroom.

Additional Resources:

A conversation that explains where this all began is available here.

Facebook: America Adapts

Twitter: @usaadapts, @kbishopwilliams

Instagram: America Adapts

 

These resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.