Accessibility-Hearing++Podcasting

Accessibility-Hearing: Podcasting Podcasting is becoming a great tool for educators to use to reach a larger audience and one that is spread worldwide. Through Podcasting we can take a simple lecture or lesson that is being taught and record the instructor and all of their notes into a neat and easy to retrieve recording. The difficulty or problem with podcasting is the ability to reach the hearing impaired. The largest problems with podcasting and many of the free sites that are available to assist you in creating them is that they do not make themselves accessible to those that cannot hear. While there are devices that allow the student or learner to see closed captioning on many video recordings as well as us lip reading in part with videos, there is no way to actually do that within a podcast. In the article by Jeff Curto, if you use the program Profcast you can overlay your podcast with a PowerPoint. This could help if you just write you notes to coincide with your podcast, but makes the lesson a little bland. It also hinders the lecture when you want to show a graph or other image and then you have to wait to go to the next screen to begin speaking again so that the student can continue reading. The article written by Patricia Deubel spends the beginning part sighting all of the reasons that podcasting is wrong because of the lack of accessibility to the hearing impaired. In the article by Jeff Frey, there are companies that will create captioning for your podcast. However, the expense is great and very time consuming. While actually creating the podcast is quite easy, having the captioning added is both time consuming and costly. All in all the wonders of Podcasting should not be eliminated as an educational tool due to its shortcomings as a device for the hearing impaired. Podcasting can help educators reach so many more students and assist students with reviewing and/or concerns with a lesson that has been made into a Podcast. There are so many other devices that can assist an instructor in reaching those students that they cannot through a Podcast that additional technology should be utilized so that all can learn and enjoy the benefits of education.

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