Podcasts: On, Traditional Education: Off

  Hello everyone! Have you ever heard something about podcasting? You are probably familiar with "iPod" and "broadcast. Podcasting is simply combination of these words. Let me explain it thorougly:

"A podcast is a form of digital media that consists of an episodic series of audio, video, digital radio, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device." 

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  Podcasting was our first assignment and for this project, I worked with my dear friend Sevilay Yıldırım. We were responsible for creating a sound rich story with sound effects for no longer than 2 minutes. We had also some words that we had to use at least four of them. Firstly, we wrote our story and narrated it. We found some sound effects and added them in accordance with the flow of our story. Then, we recorded it with our own voices. We tried to pay attention to our pronunciation, word choice and grammar. We thought that it is suitable for B1 level learners. No wonder we had some difficulties while we created the task. I want to talk about them, now. The first two sentences of the story were already given by our lecturer. So, this invited us to reflect on the appropriateness of our story to these sentences. We could not synchronize sound effects and our voices. At the beginning, it made us nervous, but as we tried again and again, we -hopefully- recorded it successfully. Apart from these, we had really fun and learned new things which were useful for us. Therefore, I certainly recommend podcasting to teachers. Because, as you all know, today's students really love technology. Thanks to podcasts which include creative tasks, you can both draw students' attention to activities and enhance the productivity of lessons. For example, students mostly get bored while they are learning grammatical rules or explanations. At this point, you can turn the lesson to a funny and remarkable one through use of podcasts. As a teacher, you can create your own podcasts or if you want to give your students an interesting task, you can also ask for their own podcasts. All you need is some technology. Believe me! 

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