Blog Post #2

The use of podcasts in the classroom can be extremely beneficial for all students, especially those who fall under the category of English Language Learners. In our course content for the week, we focused on how much podcasts have grown over the years in popularity. Not only in the classroom, but in individuals' personal lives, people are turning to podcasts for entertainment, guidance, and information. A few qualities of podcasts that make them impactful in the classroom are: authentic, diverse, convenient, and interesting. My Google alerts brought me to the article, “‘Podcast Time’: Negotiating Digital Literacies and Communities of Learning in a Middle Years ELL Classroom.” When I found this article, I did not realize how valuable and relatable it would be to this week's content and the education world. This article discusses digital literacy projects and how they can help create a classroom environment for ELL students that is welcoming and engaging. It begins by telling a personal experience of an ELL pull out classroom where five students sat in silence almost daily just working in their notebooks for their designated English language focus time. 

It clicked for one of the classroom teachers, and she realized that the liveliness and creativity podcasts bring to a classroom was the missing piece. From this point, students worked on listening to different pop culture and education podcasts to note fluency, content, and analyze skills. Then, they went to their own computers to start creating their own podcasts. From this podcast experiment, the classroom teachers found that “the project offered a glimpse into the pedagogic and transformative possibilities of digital literacy projects for creating classroom learning communities that critically engage and respond to the social worlds of ELLs” (Neufield & Smyth, 2010). Although the students struggled through this unit with the use of multimodal literacy work, the concept shed light on the support that ELL students need when it comes to engaging and responding in social and academic worlds. Without exploring podcasts in the classroom, there would not have been a clear indication of the support that those ELL students needed.


                        Reference

Smythe, S., & Neufeld, P. (2010). “Podcast Time”: Negotiating Digital Literacies and 

Communities of Learning in a Middle Years ELL Classroom. Journal of 

Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(6), 488–496.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25614593


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