Cicero Meets Podcasting
Salvete omnes, today I want to talk about you about introducing podcasts into your classroom. Now I know what you are thinking. “But Brittany, why should I give podcasting the time of day when I can look up videos on a variety topics on YouTube? What’s the difference between the two?”
Ah, my dear reader, as always you bring up an excellent point. Why don’t we take a look at these two applications and decide for ourselves which we would implement in the classroom.
The first and possibly biggest point of each one is that anyone can view and create either a YouTube video or podcast. This means that there is a wide variety of videos and podcasts available for users to explore. The second similarity between the two is the ability to subscribe. So if you find a YouTube channel or a podcast that consistently puts out content you enjoy, then you can subscribe to that channel or site and receive notifications about when new content becomes available.
The only difference between the two is the ability to download a podcast onto a computer or mobile device; though it was argued by my IT department that you can also download content from Youtube but the process seem to be unnecessarily complicated. This means that with podcasts you don't need constant access to the web to watch or listen to the content. I think that this is a really important feature in favor of podcasting. Because even in our ever-evolving technological world where we hope all our students will have access to the internet, podcasting helps us plan for the students who might not have reliable access to the internet.
During my research for this post, I found a podcast series by Latinitium, which is one of the Edubloggers I follow. Their content ranges from particular subjects and Latin expressions, to authors, specific literature, and tips for learning Latin. All of their content is presented in Latin. So naturally I explored how I would incorporate this in my classroom.
Latinitium offers an audio and video viewing option and makes the transcript available. For my purpose in this blog, I chose a podcast on the Life and Death of Cicero. Because Latinitium tries to keep each podcast at an intermediate level, this is a lesson I would use in an advanced or AP Latin class for either 11th or 12th graders. In a flipped classroom, I would assign this before we began to read some of the works of Cicero to provide some historical and cultural context. Performance indicators for Latin communication skills focus on the reading and oral performance of Latin prose and poetry and does not yet take into account the emerging popularity of conversational Latin. So in this case I will be borrowing a performance indicator- LOTE.ML.1.1.C.A: Students can understand standard speech delivered in most authentic setting. In true flipped classroom style, once students returned to class we could work through the podcast transcript in small groups so students can ask any remaining vocabulary or grammatical questions they still have. This aspect of the assignment would be focusing on performance indicator - LOTE.LA.1.1.C.D: Students demonstrate an expanding knowledge of Latin vocabulary and language structures, and an increased English vocabulary based on it.
This was pretty cool. Another use might be just for kids to hear spoken Latin. Even at a lower level, hearing spoken Latin can be interesting for them because they think it is a "dead" language. I like sometimes to put up things in Latin and have them see if they can pick out any words that they know to prove to them that they know more then they think they do. This is something more of a 9th or 10th grade thing but it is something you can do for fun. You can pick something that has vocab for the unit you are doing or a culminating unit. Great choice of podcast.
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