Casting for Knowledge

Mark Coddington:

Jesus Reyes, a fifth-grader at Dodge Elementary School, stands in front of a green piece of fabric in the school's library, reading a script he wrote about last week's Grand Island sewer emergency.

As the camera on a MacBook laptop records him, an image on its screen replaces the fabric with photos Jesus took on a trip to the city's wastewater plant this week.

Later, a classmate, Dayne Jaros, records an introduction to Jesus' piece, handing his Internet viewers off to "our on-the-spot reporter, Jesus."

The end result, an audio and video broadcast accessed over the Internet, is miles beyond kids fiddling around with their parents' video camera for a school project.

In fact, increasingly elaborate podcasts like Jesus and Dayne's are giving several area schools a medium for largely self-directed projects that provide a whole new realm to bring writing, reading and listening skills to life.

With podcasts, "learning becomes more than just a grade in the gradebook," said Jamey Boelhower, who teaches English at Centura public school near Cairo. "It matches the culture and the world they're growing up in."

At Lincoln Elementary School, about a dozen students are working on a range of podcasting projects, most of them with only basic staff instruction, said Maura Hendrickson, the school's integration specialist.

Anne Eisenberg:

These days, students who miss an important point the first time have a second chance. After class, they can pipe the lecture to their laptops or MP3 players and hear it again while looking at the slides that illustrate the talk.

At least two companies now sell software to universities and other institutions that captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk — usually PowerPoint slides and animations. The illustrated lectures are stored on a server so that students can retrieve them and replay the content on the bus ride home, clicking along to the exact section they need to review.

When it’s time to cram, the replay services beat listening to a cassette recording of a class, said Nicole Engelbert, an analyst at Datamonitor, a marketing research company in New York.

“Students already have an iPod and they already use them all the time,” she said. “You don’t need to train them.”

Professors who know less than their students do about MP3 players won’t be at a disadvantage, because the systems require little technical skill to operate. “The best lecture-capture solutions simply require the speaker to turn on a mike and push a button to start the recording,” she said. “They are simple to use.”

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 10, 2007 12:00 AM
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