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Fort Sumner Municipal Schools (10) students who took part in a Zune media player pilot study (11) used the technology to study during long bus and car rides and to access study materials including video, audio, and Microsoft PowerPoint slides in their rural part of New Mexico. This learning on the go pushed Spanish I grades "through the roof," according to Superintendent Patricia Miller.

Coley breaks the class into groups of two or three students so they can develop podcast scripts by discussing and summarizing what they've learned. Coley reviews the scripts for accuracy and helps students record audio on the classroom computer or on his iPod using a Griffin iTalk Pro (12) voice recorder. Coley adds an introduction and music between each segment before playing the finished product for the class and posting it on iTunes and mrcoley.com (13).

Coley produces (14) most of the class's podcasts with just a computer, a microphone, Internet access, and free audio-mixing software such as Audacity (15) or Apple's GarageBand (16). Teachers can even burn the audio files onto CDs so that students who lack iPods or computers at home have access to the material.

When used educationally, podcasts can empower students and teachers to become content producers rather than content consumers, and they can give them audiences beyond the classroom. Student-created podcasts reinforce course concepts, develop writing skills, hone speaking ability, and even help parents stay current on classroom activities.

When used educationally, podcasts can empower students and teachers to become content producers rather than content consumers, and they can give them audiences beyond the classroom. Student-created podcasts reinforce course concepts, develop writing skills, hone speaking ability, and even help parents stay current on classroom activities.

"It gives them a sense of purpose, rather than seeming like just another academic exercise," says Dan Schmit, creator and host of the online community KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom (17). "You give them a sense of mission for their work and give them all these authentic experiences that build their confidence for the future."

Schmit says that the best student-created podcasts go beyond isolated episodes to engage in sustained academic conversations. They are focused on a real audience and explore grade-appropriate questions that are both interesting to students and important for them to understand.

It's also about oral-presentation skills and storytelling technique -- finding the characters, conflict, and resolution that help clarify a topic for the audience. "If a podcast feels like someone is just reading to me, it's not as engaging as when it feels like the students are having a conversation with me," Schmit says. "It's sort of like an extra step that we don't usually get to do in the language arts. Here, they are listening to themselves. Even in speech class, students read their work but don't hear it, because they are in the moment."

Speaking about course content also moves students away from copy-and-paste research. "You get kids to massage the content in a way that really makes it their own," Schmit points out. "The ability to tell a compelling story is going to be one of the most important twenty-first-century skills that we can give students."

This trend, he says, "requires that teachers and students learn to be information artisans -- people who can creatively and artistically reshape information and raw material into compelling information products."

Those information products may take the form of blogs, podcasts, video games, or virtual worlds -- whatever medium is best suited to the learning objectives. School facilities and assessment methods will have to change to embrace the shift, though. Warlick envisions libraries evolving into digital workshops where students produce multimedia content. In turn, new rubrics will emerge to evaluate students' multimedia work.

Still, Warlick reminds teachers that the exchange of ideas -- not technology -- is the point, and production -- not memorization -- is the proof of knowledge. "We're in the classroom to teach them not how to podcast, but how to communicate, and communicate compellingly," he says.