Education in the twenty-first century should focus on the development of authentic literacy skills for students. Learning to read, write, listen, speak, critically analyze information and communicate ideas using a variety of modalities is vital for children of all ages. Some of the most frequent complaints of writing teachers, however, revolve around a lack of student motivation to write. How can teachers increase students’ desire to express themselves effectively and appropriately? One very effective   way is through the use of podcasts.

According to WikiPedia, a podcast is “a web feed of audio files that is placed on the Internet for anyone to download. It's usually possible to download the files directly from the website, just as one would normally do; however, special programs called podcatchers exist that let users subscribe to podcasts in order to automatically download and store the media files for later playback. One of the frequent problems with new educational innovations is their expense. Podcasts are relatively cheap to implement.

My group members and I created a podcast entitled “life after pregnancy”. We essentially interview specific individuals who were teen mom to get an understanding of what they had to go through to get past that ordeal. A series of questions were asked and the information was recorded.

Two ways in which podcasts may be used in the classroom are by either giving the students an assignment just as we received where they work in groups to create a podcast on a specified topic or the teacher uses a podcast to deliver here lesson. Both ways are effective because in one aspect the students get a hands on experience in creating a podcast and in the other aspect they benefit from hearing a well executed podcast and hopefully be inspired enough to reproduce on for them selves.