Over the past couple of years, podcasting has turned into an incredibly popular hobby as well as an effective marketing tool for many businesses. Most teachers use educational podcasts as a great tool to engage students and improve the quality of education.
At the same time, social audio apps like X Spaces are attracting more and more users. Many educators believe that traditional methods are relatively inefficient compared to these state-of-the-art technological innovations. Others believe education podcasts enhance students’ creativity and optimize students’ learning experiences.
Artificial Intelligence has certainly made it easier to create immersive educational environments in a way that we could never have imagined. AI-powered tools continuously enhance the education process and provide better conditions for students with visual or mental impairments.
As a school manager, you might wonder whether starting a school podcast is a good idea or not. Here are all the answers you need. Together, we’ll examine some of the key benefits of podcasting and see if it’s time to start your own podcast. Let’s begin:
What Are the Benefits of Podcasting?
Podcasting has numerous benefits for all businesses in every industry. Here are only some of the benefits of creating an educational podcast for schools and educational institutions.
#1 Enhance Analytical and Critical Thinking
Podcasts can be a type of research that requires students to explore academic and learning resources, collect information, and analyze and verify it. Moreover, students and teachers need to acquire a deep understanding of the topic to present it in an understandable yet professional and accurate way.
Students develop essential critical and analytical thinking skills that can help them with various tasks, such as writing research assignments. Podcasting improves students’ capacity to articulate concepts based on received, analyzed, and systematized information.
Education podcasting is not just about having a good voice! It requires a solid writing style, excellent comprehension, and open-mindedness. Creating your own podcast can give students a chance to improve these skills and become independent thinkers and writers.
#2 Increase Literacy and Self-Confidence
Word recognition or decoding capacity is one of the greatest skills we always emphasize during early education. As students get into higher education, decoding gradually becomes automatic. However, during early education, listening and comprehension skills are the only ways to ensure they can develop reliable decoding skills later on.
Another benefit of creating an educational podcast is that it can significantly improve the language acquisition process and expand students’ vocabulary. One of the obvious examples is that listening to podcasts created by well-educated speakers immediately cues the listener to the correct pronunciation of the words they may have only seen in books.
After a while, great listeners can understand complex patterns of emphasis and intonation in various sentences and grammatical structures. These patterns help students enhance their comprehension and memorization and promote the correct formulation of sentences. And one of the great things is that most of these benefits can be achieved even through passive listening.
#3 Finding a Wealth of New Topics
Young learners are curious by nature. They are always exploring new concepts and subjects and want to know more about them. But as parents, teachers, and school managers, we sometimes have difficulty finding the right educational material to satisfy their curiosity and provide them with useful and engaging content.
With a wealth of podcasts on every subject and topic, we have no such problem. Educational podcasts offer a wide range of story structures and various topics that can engage any audience with a variety of interests and needs.
Plus, accessing the world of podcasts can inspire listeners to begin their own podcasting journey. Listeners can learn various methods of narration, informal speech, casual dialogue, scripted dialogue, and interviews from professional podcasters and apply them to their work to make it more appealing to the audience.
#4 Expand Your Community
Students can integrate their questions, debates, and experiences into podcasts. Senior students, for instance, can share what has worked best for them along their educational journey to help their fellow students and young learners boost their learning process.
The purpose of creating these interactive podcasts is to establish a supportive school community where everyone is helping others strengthen their skills and learn new things.
Now, you can imagine how teachers can contribute to this process not only by introducing educational materials but also by sharing tips and insights to help students learning experience.
The school community can also invite stakeholders and other educators to participate and share their perspectives on the challenges they confront in the school. Creating a mutually supportive network helps establish a thriving community and form an identity that can promote your brand.
#5 Providing 24/7 access to this teaching resource
One of the greatest advantages of education podcasts is that they are available at any time, anywhere you are. You only need a smartphone, laptop, or tablet and an internet connection to access educational materials and continue your learning process.
Moreover, students can download podcasts on their mobile devices and listen to them whenever they are comfortable. They can even adjust the speed, listen to them on a loop or as many times as they want, and learn at their own pace. This is one of the greatest pedagogic characteristics offered by educational podcasting.
#6 Podcasting Is Inherently Exciting!
Statista published an extensive study of podcast consumers in the U.S. and Canada that can help us get a clearer picture of how popular podcasts are:
- Approximately 43 percent of Gen Z consumed podcasts weekly or more.
- 48 percent of surveyed Millennials reported they listen to podcasts every week.
This clearly shows that many parents and students are enthusiastic fans of podcasts. Although the type of content they consume may not always be educational, education podcasts constitute a great portion of the equation. This also shows that internet users today prefer video or audio content rather than text-based content.
Numerous studies have shown that younger generations have shorter attention spans. On average, Millennials have a 12-second attention span, while Gen Z’s is roughly 8 seconds.
This means that students prefer to receive content in bits and chunks. You can divide your podcasts into smaller sections to help students maintain their focus while improving their listening skills.
#7 Stay on Track
We often forget that every child has a unique learning method, style, and pace. We cannot expect all students in the classroom to perform equally. Such expectations negatively impact students’ performance and lead to missed classes and schoolwork.
While we must learn to give every child space to explore and develop their learning style, we can also provide tools and resources to help them stay on track and catch up on missed classes. Podcasts are an excellent way to ensure all students are up to speed on each subject.
Moreover, sometimes teachers are not able to attend classes. While in many traditional learning methods, this could postpone classes for a while, today, teachers can record their lectures beforehand and send them to students to ensure class won’t fall behind schedule.
#8 Build Connection
When you merely rely on school blogs or email marketing campaigns, you may get some new connections, but they will, most likely, not be enough. But when you add visual and audio content to your brand promotion strategy, you can build a network of highly powerful connections that couldn’t be created via other means.
When you think about it, it makes sense. People are more reserved when writing a blog post, a social media post, or an article, especially when the content is considered relatively professional. But when you’re on a podcast, you can easily open up to your audience and interviewer and speak your mind more confidently.
This is a huge plus to establishing close relations with Gen Z and prospective parents who want to hear an honest, friendly, and knowledgeable voice. It also helps you improve brand trustworthiness and credibility.
#9 Improve Conversion
You might imagine that a podcast is a one-sided medium, and you’re not entirely wrong. But usually, podcasts are integrated into social media platforms and websites that can help generate quality leads and improve conversions.
Podcasting helps you build effective and lucrative relationships with listeners and give them a reason to return for more content. Prospective students and parents tend to listen to podcasts because they have questions, concerns, and needs.
While you must care about improving the school’s enrollment rate, you shouldn’t forget about the other side of content creation: Audiences! A successful content strategy always prioritizes audiences’ needs and preferences to ensure they receive a customized experience.
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One of the best practices to enhance your podcasting efficiency is asking current students and parents to share their thoughts and feedback on subjects that require in-depth discussions in your podcast. This can also give you a good idea about what your next podcast episode will be about.
#10 Amplify Your Voice
Educational podcasts expose students to a wide variety of topics, provide them with a truly flexible learning experience, and help them access all the resources they need on a mobile device. But creating educational student created content also helps you use forefront technologies to reach a wider audience.
A podcast gives you a platform where you can showcase your knowledge and expertise. Many learning institutions have already incorporated podcasting into their education system to put themselves on students’ radars and inform families about current events at their schools.
Keep in mind that consuming podcasts is not only the preferred method of learning for many of the current student generations, but it might also be one of the only ways for young learners who suffer from mental and visual impairments. Educational podcasting can be an excellent way to reach them and expand your follower base.
#11 Enhance Brand Awareness
Last but not least, many learning institutions develop their own podcasts as a marketing method to enhance brand awareness. Many students prefer listening to a recorded lecture because it requires very little effort on their side. So, podcasting already has an advantage compared to other marketing practices.
Plus, podcasting is highly cost-effective. You can find an excellent podcast app for free, purchase audio recording software at an affordable price, and start your new communication channel.
If you don’t have ready-to-post content at the moment, you can share inspirational TED talks, educational-fictional stories, or even your thoughts on current events and world news. And, remember that student created content will benefit your students and your audience.
Give it a try
Creating a podcast as a supplementary educational tool can encourage students to engage in class discussions and ensure they never miss a thing. It is also an excellent way to promote your school and establish yourself as a credible educational brand with an active and supportive community.
If you haven’t started yet, it’s time to give it a try. But remember that you should integrate your podcasting journey into a more comprehensive school marketing strategy. And you’ll need a lot of help devising a customized roadmap to improve your enrollment rate and boost brand awareness.
When you need school communications help, remember us!
Here at School Webmasters, we offer a podcast for school administrators to help them improve their school communications, marketing, public relations, and website effectiveness. We hope you’ll check out both our blog (or here by topic), and our podcast (called The School Communications Scoop, available on most podcast platforms) and use our 21 years of experience in your own school.
Don’t forget that we are here to help. Whether it is website design, social media management, virtual website management, parent messaging, communication app, and more.
You can easily get a quote right now or just contact us (call 888.750.4556 and speak with Jim) and let us point you in the right direction.