When students began bringing MP3 players to school a few years ago, most teachers saw them as the latest in a long line of portable distractions from education—a lineage that began with the 1950s transistor radio and has included the boom box, the Walkman, and the cell phone.
But in a very short time, some teachers have realized that the MP3 player and podcast technology can offer something different. As Educause recently put it, podcasting is “giving educators another way to meet today’s students where they live and learn—on the Internet and on audio players.”
School Beyond the Walls
The meeting of education and the MP3 player came first at the college level, as professors began to make their lectures available as podcasts. Elementary and high school teachers, seeing similar possibilities for their lessons, are beginning to follow suit.
“Now, the students are able to take the teacher anywhere,” said La Donna Carter, technology specialist for the Carrolton-Farmers Branch Independent School District near Dallas.
Carrolton-Farmers Branch has purchased more than a hundred iPods for the schools. Each week, elementary teachers make podcasts of vocabulary words, which the students can listen to again and again on the borrowed iPods or their own players. The district reports that the average vocabulary comprehension rate has risen from 40 to 95 percent.
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School Beyond the Walls
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Students from Jamestown Elementary in Arlington, Virginia, work in teams, interviewing each other on their impressions of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
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