Abstract:

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are increasingly omnipresent component in everyday life, also having a significant impact on education. This ICT ubiquity represents an opportunity to adopt an evolutionary model to enhance both teaching and learning environments, and to rethink of existing teacher and student roles.

The use of podcasting is an emerging practice in education and during the last years provides opportunities to change and enrich teaching and learning processes, offering at the same time an exciting learning paradigm within the academic setting. Higher education is an area where the inclusion and delivery of podcast are gaining recognition and popularity owing to the pedagogical benefits it possibly offers.

Podcasting offers an easy way to create, manage and promote learning materials. Various resources such as lectures, conference communication, research reports, and expert interviews, among others, can be recorded as audio or audio-video files and delivered to students. Nevertheless, in the educational context, the use of podcasting should be done carefully considering some research findings, which have shown that students are not as ready for podcasting technology as teachers think they are. Another risk is that in this context students could have a passive role as information receivers.

We would like to consider students as active constructors of knowledge and show them the “creative facet” of podcasting. Based on a previous work we presented an instructional intervention carried out with pre-service primary teachers within a science education subject. We were mainly concerned with ICT skills and generic competencies to be acquired and applied by students. Students had to search, select and organize relevant information and adopt a critical use of it in order to become designers of different kinds of multimedia resources (podcast).

Taking into account the pedagogical potential of podcasts can offer and also the previous work main findings, we would like to move forward in order to keep on working with the second version of that instructional approach. The analysis of the strengths and weaknesses, previously reported in that work, related to tasks and final products offer us the starting point to make this new proposal. Thus, the main aim of this paper is to show a revisited version of the previous instructional sequence, redesigning it from a more integrated-learning skills approach and providing students with tools to evaluate not only their final products but also the whole learning process.

Keywords:

Podcast, student-centered strategies, integrated learning skills, science education.