In-person teaching remains the most widely used modality of education, but there’s no doubt of the importance of incorporating technology in the classroom in order to adapt and prepare students for the future. It is important to understand that choosing the resources you use to complement education can make or break how well students do. This is true of education at any level.
Whether you’re at a primary school, high school, or university, there’s a tool that can be incredibly useful: podcasts, which can help students of all ages learn. They’re a great way to make lessons accessible, engaging and informative. Podcasts are an effortless way to take in information, and they can keep students engaged for longer. Here are some reasons why using podcasts in education helps students learn:
-🎧Listen whenever, wherever: podcasts are easy to fit into daily routines. Downloadable to your phone, you can listen while doing mundane tasks like cooking or commuting. Students can learn content at any point they have a spare moment in their day, just by taking out their phone. This makes them perfect for people with busy schedules, or those who don’t have internet access all the time. Students who have other commitments, like extracurricular activities or jobs, can simply stick on a podcast during their commute.
-🤔Podcasts make it easier for students to catch-up: a teacher recording a podcast could be the solution for some students’ difficulty to catch-up. Instead of being burdened with heavy and intimidating textbooks, students could simply listen to a podcast on their way to school to catch up.
-👂Listening might be more durable than watching or reading: when listening to an audio drama, you have to use your imagination to picture what’s going on. Your brain has to work at the pace of the audio, so your mind can’t wander off like it does when reading a textbook page. And because you have to actively think about what you’re hearing, you can’t only pay attention halfheartedly like you might with video. For this reason, podcasts may be the best way to keep a student’s active attention.
-🧠Podcasts are the perfect revision tool: podcasts are a wonderful revision tool to go over past material. Students can go at their own pace, pausing and replaying at parts they need more time on. Always having a bank of podcasts about the contents of a course will be phenomenal for those stressful few months of revising.
Made with ♡ Alejandro Moreno
