My First Podcast

Module two of ICT this year and Steve Wheeler is taking us for ‘Psychological Perspectives and ICT’.

I studied Psychology as part of my Access Course the year before coming to university and so when I saw ‘Psychology’ in the module title, I panicked! I found it interesting when I previously studied it but I just didn’t get on with it – too many names and dates!

However, we are three lessons in and I am already loving it – my views towards psychology have changed now that I am looking at it in relation to education and ICT.

Steve introduced us to a number of theorists and then to different learning theories and we were sent off in groups to research specific ones in more detail and present our findings in a podcast. Pete had mentioned that we could put our finished podcasts on the TES website and so I chose the Brain Gym to research as it sounded interesting and I thought I could make a good podcast out of it.

Working with Chris (@cpstoyles), we researched the Brain Gym and its history. We looked for the arguments for and against its use in schools and we related it to learning theories.

Having never heard of the Brain Gym, I was shocked when I discovered that schools were actually buying in to it. I have taken part in Wake Up, Shake Up many times before and have seen the benefits of letting the children let off some energy before they start the day. However, the idea of specific exercises to enhance the way that children learn was new to me.

We created our podcast using a PowerPoint presentation, CamStudio and a voice recorder to record it  and then Windows Movie Maker to put this all together.

Pete and Steve’s comments were positive and I was pleased that we had created a successful podcast! However, they said that to improve it we could have less text on the page. This is something that I have often thought when I do presentations and so I will work on this next time.

Watching the rest of the classes podcasts was really useful and I learnt a lot from them. One group used Prezi and this was the first time I have seen this properly and intend to use this for my next presentation.

Here is our podcast…