Students not engaged during online meetings, try Podcasting

Schools, teachers and administrators all jumped into the fire this past spring. It seemed to bring out the best in all of us, including our students. Students were paying close attention, they were going above and beyond the call of duty to get connected, stay connected and get the job done.

Fast forward to late summer and the same does not hold true. There are a lot of us who have become numb to the whole distance learning effort. Students are tired of problem solving everything from connection problems to not being able to find their work for the day. Teachers are getting bitter when working in the cloud only offers a new level of disconnect between them and their students. Lastly, administrators are trying their best to keep everyone moving in the right direction while ensuring instructional best practices are not falling to the waste side while fires of all sizes appear across the educational horizon.

While I do not pretend to have any answers, nor do I think that I can do the jobs any better than the teachers, I do offer up an alternative that might help raise student engagement. The idea of podcasting has been around forever and has really seen a surge lately. Personally, I prefer audiobooks but the idea is the same. While students are driving or commuting in some way, provide them with a 5-15 minute lesson that they can listen to. This “podcast” doesn’t have to even be a podcast, just an audio file that students can easily access.

Podcast StudioVoice Recorder Pro

The process, use a podcasting or voice recording app like voice record pro, or

podcast studio and record a lesson. This is your chance to be personable, maybe show a little humor and even dangle a carrot for the students to listen to your entire ten minutes because they are going to get a bonus question for the next assessment or receive bonus points for coming to the next live meeting prepared.  These tools both record audio in a mp3 file which can be attached to an assignment, to a post or as a file, you can email or message these files in any LMS that you happen to be using.

Give the podcasts a try and you may find that the next time you ask a student to remove their earbuds, they might be listening to you. That would be a great problem to face.

If you want to get crazy up in here, you can go next level and create and distribute your own podcast using a service like Buzzsprout.com. I will be writing about my journey into podcasting very soon, in the meantime checkout “The Commute Institute” wherever you listen to podcasts.

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