Podcasting in Education

A new way to inspire learning

Podcasting offers an ideal tool for the creative expression of knowledge preferred by today's students, and provides an exciting way for students and educators to explore and discover educational content. Podcasts are audio or video files that are automatically delivered over a network, then played back on any Mac, PC, or iPod. When students create a podcast for class, they not only learn the content in a creative way, they learn 21st-century communications skills at the same time.

Create. Communicate. Share.

Podcasting allows educators to take their students beyond traditional assignments by allowing them to include voice recordings, photos, movies, and sound effects to share their knowledge. For example, students can draft and perform scripts as a writing assignment, create a visual progress report for an ongoing project, or submit a recorded version of a science presentation.

Podcasting is also a great way for educators to deliver content to their students. They can distribute homework assignments, record book narration for beginning readers to read along with, or create foreign language lessons that students can review at their own pace. For educators and administrators, podcasting is an effective tool for professional development, as well as for communicating with parents about classroom activities and school announcements.

Podcasting made simple

Every new Mac comes with iLife ’08—Apple’s award-winning suite of digital authoring applications featuring the latest versions of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD. With GarageBand, it’s incredibly easy to create a podcast complete with photos, presentation slides, sound effects, music, and more. GarageBand even automatically lowers the volume of background music when someone begins speaking. And with the Mac computer’s built-in microphone and iSight camera, students have everything they need to record and produce podcasts right out of the box.

Schools can host and distribute their own podcasts with Podcast Producer—part of Mac OS X Leopard Server which is included with every Apple server. Podcast Producer is a fully automated approach to encoding, publishing, and distributing high-quality podcasts. Podcasts can be published to a website, blog, or iTunes and can be distributed to any Mac, PC, or iPod on a school's network.

Thousands of educational podcasts available

The iTunes Store includes over 10,000 podcasts specific for education. Podcasts are available for most subject areas and grade levels, as well as for professional development. Students and teachers can use iTunes on a Mac or PC to search, subscribe, and listen to podcasts, and even sync them to an iPod for studying and learning on the go.