Tech ELT Blog

Podcasting 101: Active or passive podcasting?

Posted on | February 12, 2013 | 2 Comments

Coming this week, a series of posts with the content from my "Podcasting 101" talk at the IH Barcelona ELT Conference last weekend. Particularly if you came, do post comments, doubts etc, and I'll be happy to clarify them…

In my Conference session on podcasting, I drew a distinction between what I called "active" and "passive" podcasting.

Passive podcasting… merely listening

You and your learners could get a lot of listening practise out of "passive" podcasting and one of the best ways to experience how good it would be for your learners to listen to podcasts regularly is to try it out for yourself (1, in the slide, above) with a language you yourself are attempting to learn.

One of the problems you'll find is that most podcasts are not designed for language learners. The BBC's 6 minute English and BreakingNewsEnglish are two that are for that purpose and which can (2) provide extra listening material for you to take into classes.

You can also (3) recommend you learners that they use iTunes to search for podcasts on subjects that interest them and subscribe to them (though as I suggested in my talk, I've never actually found that many do this).

Active podcasting… actually talking!

My suggestion is that active podcasting is what you really want to get into — but not (4) you recording audio for your students, but (5) your students doing the recording and broadcasting it, perhaps via a blog or Edmodo, to an audience. For reasons of privacy, you might not want your audience to be "the world".

At the beginning of my talk I said that podcasting has been among the most successful classroom technology I've tried with learners: I meant specifically that kind — them doing the podcasting.

And finally, you could (6) podcast to the world yourself: with a blog and Google Ads you could — in theory — make money from doing so. Just don't give up your day job, as they say!

Later this week I'll suggest tasks that you could have your learners do that will ensure they not only record and broadcast but also learn as much English as possible in the process.

Coming next | Tools for Podcasting

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