Podcasting and Math

So, I have spent most of the week touring the internet looking for some useful lesson ideas for integrating podcasts in maths based lessons. I certainly see some value at having a link on your webpage or class blog to a newsfeed summarizing what you are doing in class each day. It would take very little effort for a teacher to do a quick 3 minute blurb at the end of each lesson regarding the specific content, what students should have taken from the lesson, where students can expect the lesson to head the next day and of course and HW or CW they are responsible for. From an assessment standpoint I can also see assigning students or groups of students to be responsible for effectively communicating a weeks' worth of content. Students would be assigned a week early on in the year and they would have would have to publish and post their summary of the course content covered during their applicable week. As it is always a struggle to find new and creative ways to assess a student's math communication grade I think that this would be a great new way to gather valuable assessment information about what your students actually know.

There are a few good math podcast that offer quick 3-5 minute fun audio. Fun facts, neat mathspariments that you can do quickly and just quirky info. This kind of podcasts could be of value for a teacher to use to "grab" a class at the start of the lesson. In our day (and i often still do this) many lessons were started with the nifty math cartoon on the overhead, the podcast could be used in the same way to settle the students focus.

Finally, I have also found a few (very few) quality math teaching and summary podcasts such as DANSMATHCAST (http://www.dansmath.com/pages/po). This podcast effectively showcases a textbook chapter and then offers some summary problems at the end. Dan's is one of the few podcasts that are actually made with the intent of the audience being an audio learner. I have found a "google" (hee hee) of sights that are just recordings of lecture based classes. I am not sure who these would be useful for besides perhaps a student in the class that wanted to review something form the class. The background noises for these podcasts are horrible and often if there is a class question you cannot hear the question, which makes it difficult to understand the answer.

I am still struggling to come up with ideas for straight podcast, I would have no problem if we were talking about video podcasts or screencasting but I think we are to stick to straight audio content. Hopefully the start of the new week will bring a fresh perspective on this assignment.