I haven’t had a lot of practice with video creation or with podcasts but I think they could be great tools to use in a classroom. A lot of issues that come up with technology being used in schools is cost. Well, the good thing about podcasts and videos is that they aren’t expensive to make. Will Richardson mentions in his reading called Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms that it doesn’t take a fancy computer to be able to store and play the files that are required for videos and podcasts and you don’t need much to make a podcast. All you need is a file to store your recording, a place to post it, and something to say. Making videos also isn’t a very expensive process. If you have computers in the classroom, or go to the computer lab, the class can record their videos and upload them straight to the server and the best part is that online servers, like YouTube, are free!
Videos and Podcasts could be used in classrooms for all sorts of things. Videos can be made at the end of the term, or with younger students, at the end of the year to show the class, teacher, and their parents what they have learned and it’s a fun and different way to display their work rather than writing a paper or doing an art project. Kids get excited when they get to work with technology, so it could get them excited to do an end of the year project, where sometimes students dread these kind of things. Podcasts can be used for creating unique homework assignments. Students could record what they learned that week and share it with students in their school that are in the same grade but in different classes, so they can hear what other students are learning as well. In high school, my writing class did a project where we wrote a paper called This I Believe, and we recorded our voices reading our papers. Then, we had a day in class where we got to listen to everyone’s recording. It was something that none of us had done before so it was exciting to get to do something different for once. Will Richardson also had some good ideas for podcast. For example, music teachers could record weekly recitals for parents to hear and science teachers could narrate labs or experiments to help the students as they are doing their labs or experiments. I think podcasts and videos are great for classrooms because they are cheap and are exciting for students to use.
Veronica's Blog 
Richardson is right (and you are smart to notice) that podcasting can be done very easily. I used to use podcasting to provide feedback to my students on their written work- it was much faster for me to record my comments on their papers and have them listen to my podcasts than it was to write comments down on papers the old-fashioned way. I appreciate your close reading of the assigned texts, as you’ll get so much more out of this class.