Live and worldwide
Geoff Taylor, an English teacher at St. Clare's, has led the way in developing regular classroom podcasts produced by our English language students. The Bardwell Road Centre Podcast is an Internet radio talk show produced by English language students at St. Clare's, Oxford". Over the past three years, Geoff and his students have produced almost 90 episodes. Geoff explains - "the podcast content is generated by groups of adult students in my morning classes, normally pre- to upper intermediate in level. Each episode is typically about 15 minutes long, and on a unified theme or topic. The basic idea of the podcast was to be like a college radio station. We would publish a magazine programme of content of most interest to the students in my class themselves and other classes in the department, also to friends and family, and then other people in the college as well as worldwide." And the podcasts have attracted the attention of EFL teaching professionals. The following quotation concludes an article in the latest edition of the IATEFL magazine, Voices:"The podcasts from St. Clare's, Oxford, UK and St. Georges, Sydney, Australia are excellent examples ... They would, I think, be very good materials to use with other students - they are interesting authentic texts in themselves and also show what students can do when given the opportunity. In a word - podtastic!" (Martin McMorrow, Massey University, New Zealand). Read Martin's article in full here. Congratulations to Geoff Taylor and all the students involved in this on-going project. You can listen to the students' regular podcasts on their podomatic website.