Crossing the Digital Divide, Teachers Tackle Podcasting

'Podcasts' may sound like a bizarre sci-fi creation to some teachers, but they are just another option on the high-tech entertainment buffet for many of their students. Podcasts -- downloadable online broadcasts that can be played on computers or portable devices -- are a leisure pursuit to a generation that has grown up in the technological age. That is why teachers -- some of them self-confessed technology neophytes -- are willing to give up a piece of their summertime to learn how to bring the medium into the classroom for teaching purposes.

"Technology is here, it's here to stay, and it's just a case of bringing technology up to where they are," language arts teacher Brian Conway said, referring to his seventh-grade students at Meredith Middle School. He was one of 16 teachers -- most of them in their 30s or 40s -- who attended a two-day podcasting institute at the school last month. "The world is even more dependent on technology. And if we don't get up to that learning curve, we're going to be left behind."

The Appoquinimink and Capital school districts and the Positive Outcomes Charter School in Camden formed a consortium to win a $400,000 federal grant that provided podcast training for teachers, said Karen Hartschuh, an instructional technology specialist at Appoquinimink. The teachers and their students don't need to own portable media players to create podcasts, Hartschuh said.

A podcast -- audio, video or photos, alone or in combination -- can be delivered via the Internet to any computer. But devices such as iPods make podcasts portable, allowing the lessons to travel with students. "You can go on vacation with your family, and on the plane cover all the assignments you are missing," she said.

And in the classroom, as students create their own podcasts, the assignments become more important to them, Hartschuh said, because their Internet audience is global, rather than the 20 or 30 people who normally might see it in a classroom.
Podcasting also opens up doors that might be locked to a variety of other teaching methods, offering new avenues of instruction to students who learn more easily through visual or auditory mediums, she said.

"It's an incredibly powerful tool, because students are digital consumers," said Jane Keyes, a former teacher who teaches the podcasting institute for Apple Inc. at schools in the Northeast, including the recent session at Meredith Middle. "They work with technology constantly, and they multi-task. They're used to learning by investigating, by being hands-on." With podcasting, she said, students also learn something about reading and writing along the way, because they have to draft a plan and research text to create a podcast.

The technology is catching on fast in schools, said Christine Dowd, another former teacher and an education development executive with Apple who also travels with the institute. She has helped train more than 500 teachers at about 30 schools in a little less than a year. "What you find is that a school has to be open to students being creative," she said of the typical participants. "It's the forward-looking schools that realize this is a great learning tool."

Delaware schools that have used podcasting to teach students include Downes Elementary in Newark. Downes formed a partnership this past school year with seniors in digital media at Delcastle Technical High School near Newport, whose students also learn by helping the younger children use the medium to create stories or poems for the Internet.

To be sure, not everyone is embracing podcasts. "People can be very scared, because they don't want to be foolish," Keyes said. "There are still school districts all over whose teachers are struggling to use word processors." Teacher Cheryle Allen-Spells, 59, who teaches eighth-grade language arts at Meredith Middle, is only just beginning to learn what podcasting is about. But attending the institute will get her going in the right direction, she said. "I just want to learn to do anything I can to help," she said of her students. Fellow institute participant Tom Harrison, 52, a Meredith Middle teacher, is much more technologically plugged in than most, he said. He has yet to use podcasting in his classroom, but looks forward to introducing it to his seventh-grade science students."To me, it's another way to get to them," he said. "You look at every trick you can to get them involved."