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My final project for the Teaching With Technology seminar is a fifteen-minute screencast on podcasting and its educational potential. It starts by situating podcasting within the general context of multimedia study and establishing its potential for communication, creativity, and analysis. It is based at every point on my own experience in teaching podcasting to students at all levels from beginning to advanced.  My opening narration says, “I’m here to show you how I teach podcasting and how I use it as a tool for teaching and learning.” A few sentences later, I say that my main purpose is to provide “an introduction to the creative and intellectual possibilities as I’ve come to know them in my teaching.” Although the presentation explains some technical aspects of podcasting such as the possibilities for syndication, it does not address the nuts-and-bolts aspects of recording and editing. These subjects, I say, are “for another video.” In place of nuts-and-bolts technicalities, it stresses that “what makes a good podcast is, above all, personality, imagination, and creativity.” The focus throughout is on what’s called “enhanced podcasting”––that is, podcasting that includes pictures and / or video and can include other enhancements such as hyperlinks and chapter divisions.

The heart of the presentation is a commentary on two podcasts done by students of mine. One of the student podcasts analyzes avant-garde music, and the other explains the student’s style of coaching to a kids’ lacrosse team that he is about to take over as coach. I chose these two examples as “opposite ends of the spectrum,” as the narration says––one of them highly technical and making no concessions to short attention spans, the other energetic, fast-paced, and concise. I play these examples in iTunes and use the “call-out” features of ScreenFlow to explain and demonstrate how to access and enlarge the accompanying pictures and activate the hyperlinks. “I hope these examples and my commentary on them will encourage you to try podcasting in your own teaching,” the narration says.

After commenting on these two examples, I offer a concise definition of podcasting and use, again, the “call-out” features of ScreenFlow to explain the subscription features of podcasting. The presentation concludes with my view of what students gain from podcasting.  A main benefit, I suggest, is the development of oral skill: it teaches students “to speak engagingly, clearly, and persuasively, a skill that is almost never taught in English courses nowadays or any other courses for that matter.”  It also teaches them about “the relation between the written and the oral, between the oral and the visual, about pacing and editing, and about the nature of multimedia.”  Above all, it teaches students, I suggest, “about themselves, when they try to find a suitable subject and make it interesting.”

What I gained from this project. When I joined the Seminar, I already knew that I wanted to do a screencast as my final project. I have often been instructed by screencasts done by others and have used them in the classroom but had never before tried screencasting myself. Doing the project thus involved, first of all, researching and trying out a number of screencasting applications. Having settled on ScreenFlow as the best for my purposes, I then had to set about learning the application in depth. I could see at a glance that it operates similarly to Final Cut, although it has a number of unique features, especially those that make it possible to record one’s computer screen and “call out” (that is, highlight, magnify, or otherwise emphasize) various aspects of what’s happening on the recorded screen. The first benefit to me, then, was learning a new application, one that I can also use in making screencasts for my students.

I also discovered something unexpected––namely, that ScreenFlow would be an ideal application to use for podcasting. Although podcasting is not its ostensible purpose, it is, I discovered, in many ways more suitable for podcasting than any of the other podcasting applications I have tried. Up until now I have used the podcasting feature of GarageBand in my teaching of podcasting. It is indeed a powerful feature, used by many professional podcasters. And yet it lacks the capability of including both still pictures and video: one has to use either one or the other but cannot use both. With ScreenFlow, however, one can incorporate both still pictures and video. Plus, ScreenFlow allows one to edit pictures, video, and audio right there within the application, although it does lack the sophisticated audio-editing capabilities of GarageBand.

Through trial and error in doing the project, I concluded that an ideal technical approach to podcasting would be to use GarageBand for recording and editing the audio and ScreenFlow for everything else. I intend to try this combination in my future teaching of podcasting. Somewhat ironically, then, doing the project showed me possibilities for innovation in an area where I regarded myself as already something of an expert––a priceless benefit, and all the more so for being unexpected.