I-Tunes Podcasts

In this assignment I was to listen to various Podcasts about education on I-tunes. I listened to different podcasts from SmartBoard Lessons, KidCast, ConnectLearning, EdTechtalk, MacBreak Weekly, and This Week in Photography. I was to listen in order to see the different ways that podcasts can be done.

I first listened to the Smartboard Lesson titled "Smartboard Lessons 150: Finally the Future" by Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger. They spoke about this being their last podcast under the title Smartboard Lesssons. This podcast was very conversational between two people. This podcast has a phone number where listeners can call in and they also have a website where they posts all of the websites that they speak of on the podcast. They don't actually give their website, which would be great for someone like me who listened to this podcast for the first time. They used music to separate segments, which I thought was a great idea. They also said that they sometimes have guests.

KidCast: Learning and Teaching with Podcasting was the next podcast that I listened to. The show was called "Some thoughts on Video Podcasting" by Dan Schmit. This podcast is just Mr. Schmit talking about different issues in education, this one was about Video vs. Podcasting. This podcast uses music just as the Smartboard lessons do. He refers to listener's emails in his podcasts, so I assume he uses those to help him shape the content of his podcasts With video versus podcasting he said that one doesn't necessarily lead to another and its all about what you want, what you are looking for. Video podcasting has a lot more to deal with production wise: lighting, video editing, multiple takes. I thought that Mr. Schmit's podcast was very well understood; he was very articulate.

I then listened to David Warlick's Connect Learning podcast. The particular episode that I listened to was titled: "A Conversation about Podcasting with Media Coordinators." The format of this one was different than the previous two. Mr. Warlick was in a room with a lot of Library Media Specialists from across North Carolina. There were questions, answers, and comments back and forth between the host and the media specialists around the room. I enjoyed how informal this podcast was, with different people speaking up when they had something to add to the discussion. I also liked the fact the host makes sure that the participants in the discussion do not say their names, so that anonymity was kept.

I also listened to several podcasts by EdTechTalk. Teachers teaching Teachers #157 had many guests and was about the New York Metro Museum of Art Webinars for teachers. This podcast was a lot like talk radio. It was much more formal, whereas EdTechHangout was very informal and very conversational. EdTechWeekly was a face paced roundup of news and resources of the world of education and technology. It was a little hard to keep up with this one because it moved so fast.

The last two I listened to were MacBreak Weekly and This week in Photography. MacBreak Weekly was a roundtable discussions with several top journalists talking about the latest Mac and/or Apple news. This Week in Photography discusses camera techniques, technology, and news. It has many guest interviews. I didn't like this one as much as others because they was much more small talk than there was talk about anything to do with photography.