My most recent podcast addresses the topic of Social Media and its benefits in relation to learning and engagement. I approach the topic through the lens of personal experience. Recently I was assigned a group assignment that was fundamentally an online assignment with the group collaborating through different digital platforms, most notably Social Media. I discuss the groups use of social media and how we used it to our advantage and how it helped myself and others overcome obstacles that we faced. I researched multiple sources that supported my stance on the topic and found some good opinions from these sources which I reflected back onto my personal experience with my group project. The sources provide an insight into the world of education and its relationship with social media as a learning device, expressing the benefits social media can have on learning and engagement in the modern day. These points allowed my podcast to be elevated to a higher standard as my experiences and beliefs were backed up by sources and studies.

I was interested in integrating music throughout the entire podcast, positioning music in small segments throughout the podcast just to break up the flow and pass it out so it wasn’t just me talking for 4 minutes straight and boring you with my monatone voice. The first podcast I produce I used music and only had it play as an introduction and to close out the podcast. However, this time I was interested in trying something different and adding the music at 5 different points throughout the entire podcast. I chose the song Jump Start by Afrosamuraiist because I thought It best encapsulates the essence of social media, social media to me feels like a very upbeat and lively thing so I wanted to reflect that with my choice of music.

Creating my second podcast I felt confident that I had learned from my previous experiences. I tried my hardest to eliminate any ‘ums’ and ‘arghs’, and I feel as if I was successful. I did have problems with muddling up my words when reading off my script, though after practice and numerous takes I was able to produce the perfect recordings of each segment.

This time around I used Garageband instead of Audacity because I had recorded my voice on my iPhone and Audacity did not run Quicktime Player files. I found Garageband very easy to use but had some difficulties on the way. Arranging the different files in position was easy although altering the sound of each file at different points was difficult and I failed to find a good solution besides manually reducing and increasing the sound when recording it all together. Another obstacle I found with Garageband was saving the file as an mp3, SoundCloud would not upload the standard Garageband file so I had to do some research and find a way to export the file to ‘disk’ and export it as the favoured Mp3 file. I can see myself adapting and developing as a podcast create and online content creator as well, the more I am active and working on overcoming challenges and obstacles the better my understanding has become.

Enjoy the Podcast and let me know what you think, any feedback is good feedback 😀

References:

Dougherty, K. D. and Andercheck, B. (2014) ‘Using Facebook to Engage Learners in a Large Introductory Course’, Teaching Sociology,

Faizi, R., El Afia, A. and Chiheb, R., 2013. Exploring the potential benefits of using social media in education. International Journal of Engineering Pedagogy

Music: Jump Start by Afrosamuraiist soundcloud.com/ridgelinesound/rl005 (CC.BY 3.0)

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