Pods and Blogs

In my weekly eSchoolNews update this week, there were two articles about technologies that I have been thinking about recently: podcasting and blogging.

Will Richardson's Podcast Nation summarized where the state of podcasting in education is at the moment. His article linked to some important sites (including blogs) where teachers are sharing ideas for how to use podcasting in the classroom. One very good point that I read somewhere in the links was the reminder that we as educators need to make sure that there is educational value in a particular kind of technology. We often like to jump on bandwagons without knowing where we are going. Still, I feel the same way as many of the contributors to the Podcast sites feel - that experimentation and research will be valuable.

Tom Hoffman's article about Students' Personal Blogs also raised a valuable point about the use of this new technology in the classroom. Blogs are online journals that allow people to post their thoughts about anything they like, and have other people read and comment on those thoughts. While similar in nature to a personal diary or journal, the obvious difference is that they are online, thus open to public viewing.

I do like their potential for creating communication among classmates and teachers, and I think students could be creative in the topics they discuss. Personally, though, I do believe that one has to be careful about what he or she posts on a blog. This technology is so new that we haven't really fully realized the implications of posting our thoughts online. For instance, if you post thoughts that are controversial, you shouldn't be surprised if those thoughts come back to haunt you down the road. So I as an educator would want to talk about that with my students.

In short, I am happy to see educators out there who are thinking like me about the possibilities of podcasting and blogging. These technologies are fairly easy to use, apparently, but their value in education is not yet proven.

Lots to think about.