Edutopia Podcasts

The first podcast that I listened to was titled "The Edible Schoolyard." This podcast was recorded at the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, California. It was a video podcast of many middle school students who were using hands-on activities to learn many different important things. In this school, teachers used an "edible schoolyard" (garden) as the center of learning to help teach many subjects including social studies, math, science, and life skills. Everyday the students would start their school day working in their "edible schoolyard" harvesting their foods, and then they would move into the inside learning lab to cook their foods and learn the many different processes taking place in the garden. Having the garden allowed these students to learn life skills such as cooking and gardening while also learning the core subject material such as photosynthesis and how the water cycle works.

The second podcast that I listened to was titled "A Night in the Global Village." This video podcast was recorded at Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas. In this podcast students and teachers from Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning are trading their privileged status as Americans for a night to live the life of the less fortunate of the world. This program which is called the Global Gateway Program allows the students and teachers to really feel what other families who are in poverty are faced with everyday. On the Heifer Ranch, living arrangements and conditions closely resemble those of daily living in Guatemala, Thailand, Zambia, Appalachia, and refugee camps. During this program, the students and teachers have to stay the night at one of the different sites on the ranch. During the first part of the day, the students and teachers walk around the ranch and visit these sites, and at each of the sites they talk about poverty, famine, and sanitory problems in many different parts of the world. After visiting each of the different sites, the students and teachers are assigned a location that they have to stay, and they are given minimal resources. The students and teachers go through the night having to learn how to trade their resources for resources that other families may have and learning to make due with the supplies that they are provided with. After going through the night, the students were given a time for reflection to state their feelings of being in these unfortunate situations.

Watching and listening to these podcasts was absolutely amazing. Both podcasts were extremely interesting and really showed how effective the hands-on approach to learning can be. I think that it is great that these students were given the opportunity to experience the activities recorded in these podcasts. Through having these real-life experiences, these students learned important things that impacted their lives greatly. As a future teacher, I believe using the hands-on experiences like these displayed in these video podcasts will be very beneficial for the students in my classroom because it will help provide variety in the teaching methods to help meet the needs of all of the students in my classroom.

As for the video podcasts, I really believe they are also going to be one great teaching tool to incorporate into the classroom. Video podcasts are now being used for many things including teaching lessons and collaborating with schools across the world. In my classroom, I hope to use video podcasts to do both of these things and hopefully many more things. I believe that using these video podcasts will not only provide differentiation in teaching instruction, but it will also provide opportunities for the students to become more familiar with this type of technology theirselves. As time goes on, technology is becoming more and more advanced, so I believe that it will be very beneficial for all students to learn the many different types of technology that they are probably going to have to use on a daily basis when they begin their own careers.