SMART-3

MP3 Players

Pros

Creating, listening, promote critical thinking/problem solving/workplace skills, help ELL students improve skills, help foreign language studiers, teacher reviews can be posted for extra help, testing past rote memorization

Cons

Distracting, battery life (if not charged), cheating (audio recordings of study notes), illegal uploading and downloading

What stands out to me most about these links is that many are just like blogs, only you can hear and read what the writer has to say. Sometimes it is very hard to understand what a writer is saying because inflection cannot be detected in words on a page, but when you actually hear what the writer thinks you get a better idea of how they actually feel. This could be used in a classroom to better give emotion behind what student writers are typing in blogs. They can type their blog and also add their voice in to give emphasis where they need, outline what is most important, and show inflection.

I think that many of the suggestions for making podcasts could be useful to me in the future. As it says in the book, “successful podcasts must be engaging and contain reliable information, requiring research, script writing and revision, rehearsal, legible recording, and editing before the podcast can be published.” This simple sentence is proof that using podcasts in the classroom and publishing our own podcasts in the classroom is a valuable way for students to learn.