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March 12, 2005
Podcast review: Teach42 Podcast
This entry posted in:
3 and a half stars
, I watch
, Podcast Review
Format: audio blog entry
Content: technology and education
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: watch
Typical Length: 25 - 35 minutes
Stephen Dembo at Teach42 is an educator by vocation and a podcaster by obsession. Stephen's podcasting about educational issues and often about the conjuncture between education and technology, as befits his role as a Director of Technology. Stephen also occasionally podcasts about podcasting, blogging, and gadgetry without a direct link to education.
Gadget-based podcasts often provide interesting information about how other real people use their technology and how well the technology works in the real world - I found some of Stephen's commentary about his iPaq phone/PDA to be very interesting. However, I think the real value of Stephen's podcast is his commentary on education and technology in education. Stephen's been in education for some time and has seen it from a variety of positions, both in the classroom and out - he's one of those rare male teachers who loves to teach early childhood and has more recently been the Director of Technology for a small school in Chicago. His insights cover a wide variety of subjects within education, and he pays a lot of attention to other educator's blogs and podcasts and comments freely on those as well, bringing many different viewpoints into his podcast. His commentary on technology and education is especially enlightening, and he's clearly got a love of technology that provides an important viewpoint into this controversial topic.
Stephen is in his last semester as Director of Technology, but I hope that Stephen will continue to evangelize the importance of technology in education even after he's left behind the day-to-day worries of network outages and printer problems.
Stephen often speaks very quickly, which shows his enthusiasm for his subject, but can make it hard to follow his podcast - this issue might be worth an extra effort on Stephen's behalf to try to account for. Audio quality is mostly good in the Teach42 podcast, although Stephen's car-casts have an understandable weakness with regards to audio quality. In addition, some of Steve's podcasts have less than ideal balance between music and vocals and I occasionally have to adjust the volume of my player to account for the difference between Stephen's intro / outro or interstitial music and his vocal segments. Stephen makes a point of noting that he's not editing his podcasts and we're getting the "real Stephen" all the time. I think that it's great that many podcasters aren't editing what they say in their podcasts - that level of honesty is one of the things I like about podcasting. The downside of this "live production" model is that the balance of content to environment doesn't get the attention it deserves in many cases. Stephen encodes at what seems to be a variable bit-rate (the podcasts range from 65kbps to 96kbps) which is ok, although the structure and content of this podcast doesn't seem to require a 96 kbps encoding. Stephen's vocal quality is decent and his podcasts are almost universally work- and child-safe. Music track lengths not too important - Stephen doesn't always include music in his podcasts and rarely more than one track. Meta-data is OK - Stephen gives us the name of the podcats and the date in the file and track name. He uses the album name tag to include descriptive information about the podcast, which while not logical from a data standpoint at least gets that information on my portable player where I can see it. Stephen podcasts every couple of days, perhaps twice a week.
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Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at March 12, 2005 08:58 AM