EDM 310 podcasts evaluations

The assignment for this week was to listen to and analyze four podcasts recorded in our very own EDM 310 class with Dr. Strange. I chose the one in which Kimberly and I participated in on "Burp Back Education," the podcast on Randy Pausch's last lecture with Megan and Keith, the podcast about useful teaching tools for elementary school teachers by Joyce, Jared, Lauren, and Erica (who are actually in another class at a separate time), and the interview conducted by Jonas, Hannah, and Anthony on social networking in education. Overall, I feel that my fellow classmates and I did an exceptional job, but still have plenty of room for improvement. In this post I will critique each podcast, and give a brief description on each.

The burp back education podcast was designed as an interview with our course instructor, Dr. Strange. I feel that this interview flowed naturally and consisted of relevant, important questions, in which Dr. Strange answered eloquently. As, I listened to this podcast, however, I thought of many other topics and questions that I should have asked about at that time. Hopefully, this will lead our listeners to asking more questions about the topic as well. The podcast provided a link at the end of the interview that could allow listeners to further research project based learning teaching skills and ideas. Overall, I feel this podcast was successful in explaining burp back education, and how to avoid it.

The next podcast I listened to was about Randy Pausch's (a professor at Carnige Mellon) last lecture. This podcast came across as slightly scripted and mechanical. However, except for a few exceptions, the podcast was well organized. Another feature I found useful was that they provided a way for the listeners to view his speech themselves. The only suggestion for this podcast would be to practice more and become more familiar with the information.

The third and fourth podcasts I listened to were hard to find problems with! The podcast on useful internet sites for elementary school teachers provided many sites such as askjeeves, education-world.com, and teacherpathfinder.org, and a description of how each are used for teachers and/or students. The only thing I may want to suggest would be to not repeat certain functions of these websites too many times because it may become repetitive. As for the interview of Angela Rand, I found this group asked great questions and Mrs. Rand seemed very informed and passionate about social networking and its many uses. Overall, all groups did a great job creating their very first podcasts!