a reflection on Michelle’s discussion entitled “Podcasting, Languages & ESL Students”.

This article is a manifestation on Michelle’s discussion entitled “Podcasting, Languages & ESL Students”.  Michelle highlighted the immense reward of podcasting in assisting learning for ESL students. She illustrated how podcasting can be used for students as designers in creating their own original work, but moreover can be used as a means for ESL learning. This is notion of teaching English as a second language through podcasting is already being utilised within the educational sphere. Marc Prensky states that “new technologies have strong potential uses in education” mostly for “language teachers who make podcasts for their students”. Prensky describes podcasting as “the technology of creating audio or video files” which are then circulated across the internet.

I found this article recommended by Michelle particularly insightful and supportive in re-evaluating the role of technology in primary education. Prensky mightily detailed how “students are learning, adopting and using technology” at a rapid speed which requires teachers to embrace the technological world. The key to adapting to this ever-evolving teaching medium is to carefully consider “strategies for teaching with technology that can make both students and teachers contented while allowing students to go as far as they can with these technologies.” He states that for students these technologies “characterise their age and that they love to use, and that arrange them for the twenty-first century future as well”. 

I found it chiefly helpful the way Prensky perceives new technologies for education as incoming and changing too fast for teachers to expect to master. Therefore, rather than seeking to master new technologies educators should become learners alongside their students. I found it quite liberating to realise that instead of wasting some degree of teaching time to become technologically skillful, teachers should let students do this. This frees teachers to help students apply technologies wisely to real problems and to mirror and search for the deeper issues that the technologies raise. Prensky also evaluates Wikipedia, podcasting, instant messaging and mobile phone cameras with this educational perspective. He concludes the article by saying:

“To use the twenty-first century’s rapidly emerging technology effectively for education, we must invent best practices together. In an era whose often unbelievable technological changes we are struggling with, the mantra – for both educators and students must be this: We are all learners. We are all teachers.