Taste of Tech

This is the second in a series of posts about podcasts for teaching and learning. A number of podcasts are available to help supplement classroom instruction in a variety of areas. This time, we’ll look at math.

The Mathgrad Podcast discusses everyday math for everyday people. The goal is to discuss the mathematics behind many real life topics in a way that even the worst mathphobe will gain some insight. Topics range from the math underlying voting schemes to the mathematics of loan payments.

Dan’s Math Cast is a math podcast for students created by math teacher and textbook author Dan Bach. The show features stories, challenge problems, and clear explanations of the beautiful world of math.

The Math Factor is a short podcast that poses a problem each week. For instance, suppose someone has a bag full of red balls and blue balls. He pulls four balls out of the bag, and they’re all blue. He tells you that there was a 50% chance of that happening. How many balls were in the bag when he started, and how many were each color?

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. I’m so used to listening to podcasts that I regularly try to pause or rewind the radio. It’s a little embarassing when I catch myself changing the radio station by mistake. It just seems natural that I should be able to back it up and replay something I missed or wanted to hear again. It doesn’t help that I listen to a lot of NPR podcasts, and that, when the radio’s actually on, it’s usually tuned to NPR.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a live call-in talk show, and thought, "if this were live, I’d call in and make a comment." Turns out, it was live. I’m totally used to consuming information (at least, audio information) on my own time.

Time shifiting isn’t new. In high school, I used to tape Letterman each night, and get up in the morning and watch it before school. That way, I could skip the commercials and stupid parts, still get a decent amount of sleep, and still be up-to-date on what happened on the show. But it wasn’t until recently that some people started using things like TiVo to do it with everything.

I wonder whether the news cycle pendulum is starting to swing the other day. When I was a kid, everyone watched the evening news. There was one newspaper edition per day. The news cycle was a whole day. If it happened after deadline, it’s tomorrow’s news. Over the years since then, the cycles have gotten shorter, to the point where it’s nearly instantaneous now. If a major story breaks, it’ll be on CNN (and CNN.COM) within a few minutes. Since that isn’t fast enough, it’ll also show up on the RSS aggregator on my desktop, to make sure I’m not out of the loop. For a long time, we’ve had a lot of news junkies. We have to be informed. We have to know what was going on in the world all the time.

Now, I’ve taken that immediate, up-to-the-minute news, and thrown it on an MP3 player. I’ll listen to it when I get a chance. I don’t have time right now. We’re back to the longer cycles. I think this kind of thing helps us focus less on what other people are up to, and more on what we’re doing.

This is the first in a series of items about how existing podcasts can be used to supplement classroom instruction in various subject areas. One of the natural applications that comes to mind is in the area of foreign language. In many cases, we teach foreign language in an immersive environment. The German teachers exclusively use German in their classes. Sometimes, students become very frustrated with this approach, but it does help them learn to use and understand the language.

It is potentially helpful for students to hear native speakers of languages, or at least different, fluent speakers of foreign languages. This is where podcasts can come in.

Consider PIEcast. Created by the Partners in Excellence, a language-learning project in Scotland, this podcast offers language learners opportunities to practice the language they’re learning in interesting ways. There are Spanish, German, and French versions of the podcast.

Larry Keim is a middle school Spanish teacher in Mesa, Arizona. He created the Rolling Rs video podcast to help students learn Spanish.  He has produced 16 episodes since the beginning of the year. InstaSpanish is an interactive weekly podcast which includes listening comprehension exercises and grammar lessons for students of all levels. Recent episodes have covered slang terms, listening comprehension, and differences between verb tenses. Spanish Arriba is a weekly audio podcast to help Spanish language learners.

The French Pod Class is a podcast for French language learners. Students can also dive into French culture and language with a Parisian speaker on the French Poetry podcast.

There are several podcasts to help with learning German. Speaken Sie Deutsch is one. Let’s Speak German is another. My German Class is a video podcast.  German Poems is a podcast that focuses on classical German poetry from the likes of Goethe, Schiller and Heine.

JapanesePod101 is a daily podcast to help Japanese language learners. The goal of the project is to make learning and speaking Japanese easy and fun. The program emphasizes situational Japanese, so listeners learn which forms to use in different situations. Learn Japanese is another place to learn about Japanese culture and language.

Chinese linguistics expert Serge Melnyk offers free and easy Mandarin lessons on his podcast.

What if the foreign language is English? There are also a lot of resources available for English language learners, too.

Disclaimer: Not being fluent in these languages, I haven’t actually listened to these podcasts. It really wouldn’t do me a lot of good if I did. But teachers of these languages may find some valuable resources in these links.

This past winter, our school district was bit by the podcasting bug. A lot of people were very interested in the technology, and immediately saw all kinds of applications for it. We could podcast our morning announcements. We could podcast board meetings. The principal could podcast messages to the students and parents. We could podcast staff development sessions. We could podcast physics lectures. We could podcast just about everything.

But it’s more complicated than we want it to be. It’s not impossible — and we did manage to get some podcasts online. The process was fairly painless, but required some prerequisite skills. So we tried to go right from the big wheel to the two-wheeler and ended up with a scraped knee.

Let’s look at this a different way. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web site. He intended the web to be a collaborative space, where everyone can create and share content, and everyone can make links between different ideas. Five years later, we wired the schools to use this technology. Five years after that, we started encouraging teachers to put information online, to be content providers as well as content consumers. We’re another five years down the road now, and we’re just getting into blogging and online learning, and using tools that make it really easy to put things online.

Podcasting won’t take that long, but maybe we need to work on being podcast consumers before we’re podcast providers. To that end, I’ll be exploring some ways we can use existing podcasts as resources with our students.

In order to take advantage of these resources, it’ll be really helpful for you to know what podcasting is. If you haven’t been reading all of my posts, go back and take a look at What is Podcasting? to get a quick overview. Then put your helmet and knee pads on, and we’ll hop back on the bike.