WGBH Podcasts.

I listened to the podcasts from the K-5 Section and I found some pretty neat videos on solar eclipses and the moon. I listened to "Solar Eclipses" first. It was hosted by Susan Stolovy of the SIRTF Science Center and produced by NASA/ JPL Caltech. Susan talked kind of fast which made it hard to understand her. The video defined the terms "umbra" and "penumbra". An umbra is the area inside a full solar eclipse and the penumbra is the area inside a partial solar eclipse. There was an animation to demonstrate how a solar eclipse takes place but it didn't last very long. It took a lot of attention to really make sense of the video. The video did point out that the moon is four hundred times smaller than Earth but that it is four hundred times closer to the sun than Earth is. If these proportions were different, there would not be a solar eclipse ever because the moon would either be too big and block the sun completely or the moon would be too close and would block the sun completely. This podcast was okay but I liked "Total Eclipse Animation" by NOVA "Eclipse of the Century" better. This video discussed most of the same principles and ideas but also had some new facts, such as the stages of the eclipse and that the solar atmosphere that is seen during a solar eclipse is known as the corona. This podcast also had some animation to help demonstrate the concept. With the two videos combined, I think students could probably grasp the concept. I like that these videos were not very long. Each video was just over a minute long. I also watched a third video, "Why Doesn't the Moon Fall Down?", produced by NASA/ JPL Caltech. It was hosted by Doris Daou of the SIRTF Science Center. I learned some new things from this video! The moon is actually always falling toward Earth but because of the rate and direction of the fall, the moon will never hit Earth. The moon is never falling down in the same direction because the moon spinning quickly about its axis causes the moon to fall in a path that ends up rotating around Earth. If the moon spun any faster, it would spin out of control and out of its path around Earth. If it spun any slower, it would fall into Earth due to Earth's gravitational pull. This explains the moon's orbit around Earth.
I really like the video and audio podcasts much better than the podcasts that are just audio. These could very well be of use in a classroom because having a short video that gets right to the point of an issue and illustrates it well is beneficial. The animation of difficult topics really brings the topic alive for students and helps them put the facts that they know into play.
Also, since these videos were all short and the three of them combined didn't take up much more than five minutes (if even that long), they could easily be integrated into a day of class. Lengthy videos or videos that require a teacher to "find the spot" of interest in them are hard to fit into an already busy day. I know that I had teachers who battled often with the VCR or DVD player, trying to find where we left off with a long video or where the information was on the video that we needed for that day. The short time span of the video is also good since most children do not have very long attention spans. Long videos also provide one of the best opportunities for sneaking in a nap and that is never a good thing for the teacher or the student.
I really do think that podcasts like this will definitely be beneficial and readily useful in a classroom.