Bring Podcasts to the Classroom

Using podcast in a language learning classroom has multiple folds of benefits to both teachers and learners. On that benefit list, the basic items would be being helpful for the learners to be exposed to authentic language and culture contexts, while on a higher level of benefits, the concept of using podcasts enables our learners to explore the world related to the target language in their own way and at their comfortable pace. For teachers, language teaching will be beyond textbook and classroom and can be stretched to more dimensions. Take some of the popular podcasts as an example.  I checked out National Public Radio podcasts to get started with the idea of using podcast in the classroom. I The featured Society and Culture StoryCorps was especially interesting to me because I believed that it would be a great resource for advanced learners to know more about American culture, society and values. Here are what I found and what can be used in a English learning classroom.

Let’s take the episode of “Gift from Your Parents” for example.  It is about 20 minutes’ long podcast, with shared life stories from people across the country. Those stories are very touching and inspiring, which will engage the students in thinking of what gifts they have gotten from their parents. The episode can be used for an example of story sharing in a flipped classroom and I can set up a new thread and invite everybody in the class to share their story after listening to the “Gift from Your Parents” podcast. I can also use this episode to prompt students’ reflecting upon their family values, family traditions and family impact on them. What will be more interesting is I can also use this episode in a lesson for target culture. Since all the stories shared in the podcast were real life story from all walks of life, it is a good opportunity for the students make connections with American culture and have sympathy to ordinary American people they have never met and known.

Putting all together, we can do various activities with even just one episode of podcasts. Let alone, students can explore much more with their own interests, learning goals and learning pace. So we are giving our students a hand tool for learning instead of a textbook, no matter how wonderful the textbook could be. 

From Most of Students are Learning to All of students are Learning

What is a flipped classroom really flipping over? A simple answer to this question is the that teacher’s instruction and students’ homework. To be more specific, students take teacher’s instruction at home while doing their homework in class at home. A teacher from a traditional classroom might be asking: then, what does the teacher do in class? The answer is providing help and feedback for the students while assessing their learning. Altogether, in a flipped classroom, successful learning and teaching are achieved through interactions.

According to Three Reasons to Flip Your Classroom, students in flipped classroom spend almost all their class time interacting with others, while in fact the interaction starts from home. The moment the students start to watch the video integrated to the lesson by their teacher, their interactions with the learning content, the topic and lesson materials are active, productive and even proactive. Once students gain the control over their learning, at their own pace, and to the depth of their interest, they are more motivated and engaging. Besides interacting with learning materials and available resources for learning, students also interact with their peers through collaboration both inside and outside of classroom. For example, students will bring in their questions and study problems from home to classes, and a group discussion or collaboration in class homework tasks will enable students peer teaching, to fill in the gap, re-evaluate their own learning, and collaborative learning. Learning in this process is natural, on-going, and effective.

Ultimately, students in a flipped classroom will put high value on their active interactions with the learning material, learning resources, peers, and teacher, which motivate them to be more active and engaged. That most of students are learning in a traditional classroom is moving toward all of the students are learning in a flipped classroom.

Such active interaction seems save teacher a lot of work while actually not. Flipped classroom definitely put more professional demands on teachers. As John Sowash put it, preparing a lesson needs more time than you think! Not only teachers need to find or create appropriate videos for the lessons, most importantly, they need to be able to direct the students to stay on track while motivate them to dig deep. They also need tailor students’ needs at any time.  For example, what lesson design for the specific content will engage the students the most while the students’ exploration on the topic will still be focused? What questions are to be used in the instructions will lead students to the appropriate thinking? Since students are the center of learning in a flipped classroom, teachers’ assessment on individual and group learning is on-going and dynamic. So as the feedback given to the students. Thus a teacher in the flipped classroom has to be ready to answer questions, give helpful individual feedbacks, open to adjustments, direct more capable students to more resources and encourage less capable students to keep trying. In a word, teachers in flipped classrooms have to be prepared for challenges but students’ growth worth every trying.