Making Learning Connections - ISB Podcasts

What’s all the talk about?

Podcasts. Podcasting. Whether in noun or verb form, what are we talking about? Podcasts are a way to build connections with an audience with long-form content. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram facilitate sporadic connections through often disrupted content. An appropriate analogy would be: Books are to audiobooks as blogs are to podcasts. Conveniently, you can listen to podcasts while driving, while traveling or while exercising.

Podcasts are typically created to generate a buzz around a concept or business venture, to share an important message and simply to have some fun. They have a variety of formats including an interview with a single host or an interview panel, scripted non-fiction based on a single theme, news summaries within a specific industry, educational podcasts, such as the TED Radio Hour, and even scripted fiction.

Making Learning Connections in our ISB Learning Design Center (LDC)

International School Bangkok (ISB) recently launched our own ISB podcasting studio. Located on the top floor of the Middle and High School Library, Mr. Michael Boll, our Middle School and High School Technology Learning Coach, spearheads this new and exciting venture showcasing stories, learning, and communication from across ISB community.

Mr. Boll got into podcasting in order to research and locate autism support networks when his son was diagnosed and discovered he could connect with others from all over the world. He was also involved in podcasting at a previous school he worked at. “We created our own educational technology podcast which was a roundtable discussion around an article we read.” They shared these with the global educational technology community. The beauty of podcasting is that the audience needs not only to be inside the school, but the podcasts can be shared with a larger audience, creating a professional learning network that had no borders.

Currently, ISB has both student and adult learners who are using the podcasting studio. When students are creating podcasts, interviewing for a podcast or even being interviewed, Mr. Boll shares with all of them that as a podcaster, your audience is expecting you to represent them. “As soon as you turn on the microphone, people change. There is a formality that comes with recording for an authentic audience.” We believe that the ability to tell a compelling story in any genre will be one of the foundational skills that we can provide for our students. Podcasting is a way for us to create a story-telling experience. Teachers and students need to be content artisans. Artists who can creatively shape content and concepts into compelling informational products. It isn’t as much about the skill of podcasting, as it is the how and the artistry of communicating.

The Learning Design Center (LDC) will be spending lots of quality time in the ISB Podcasting studio! In order to connect our community and provide a variety of parent education opportunities, we will be interviewing each of our visiting consultants and creating podcasts made available for our faculty, parent community, and the wider community in Thailand.

If you cannot make it to a coffee, workshop or the evening sessions at ISB, we will be podcasting in order to embrace another pathway for communication and connection within our ISB learning community - so you will never miss a moment. Please be on the lookout in our divisional newsletters and our ISB social media pages for links to podcasts featuring consultants, faculty and administrator panels, and students!

You can access our Podcasts via our website: https://pantherpod.isb.ac.th/ or search for us on iTUNES (Panther Spotlight) and subscribe.

This piece is brought to us by the ISB Learning Design Center.