How to Create Effective Instructional Materials for the World Wide Web

Creating effective instructional materials for the World Wide Web takes your education style out of the classroom and allows it to be used in several different ways. The first thing to decide is what kind of instructional materials you wish to use. You can make anything from a podcast to teach a particular concept to an interactive blog between you and your students. The key that keeps your instructional materials effective is making sure that they are available to a wide variety of students and refer directly back to your region's educational standards.

Things You'll Need

• Microphone
• Recorder (or mixer)
• Sound card
• Internet connection
• Audio software
• RSS feed subscription

Instructions

Making an Effective Educational Podcast

1. Create an outline of your subject. Make sure you have a list of concepts you wish to cover already planned out. For example, if you are teaching a lesson on vocabulary, make sure to write everything out that you want the students to learn. What is your objective? What is your intended audience? How can they use this information? What steps do they need to complete to learn this? Having a clear and set goal in mind before you start will help you make sure that your lesson is an effective one.

2. Record your audio. Most computers have a microphone that is built in to the hardware but you may need to use a different one for clearer sound. Microsoft Windows has its own program called Sound Recorder. Mac users can use Quicktime Pro. There are also free online audio enhancers called Audacity or GarageBand (through iTunes) that will allow you to record your audio and save it as the correct format.

3. Listen to your audio and edit for mistakes or long pauses.

4. Add music and art to your podcast to spice it up. Remember, this will be heard by a wide variety of people. The right aesthetics make people more likely to return for any future podcasts you make. Impressing students is a tough call but keeping those students coming back calls for some visual or musical sleight-of-hand to make it more interesting.

5. Add a tag to your podcast. Keep it simple. People will use this to decide whether or not they want to subscribe to your podcast or not, so it needs to have a purposeful title.

6. Publish your podcast to an RSS feed. RSS feeds are used for types of media that are frequently updated, like podcasts and blogs. Users who subscribe to your RSS feed will automatically get an update whenever you publish something new to your RSS feed.

7. Subscribe and download your podcast. Usually using iTunes (or a program like it) is your best bet. It's user-friendly for people posting to it as well as for people downloading from it.

8. Evaluate. Go back to your state or country's educational learning standards to see if you have met your goals. Did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish? Do any of your subscribers have any questions that you can address in a subsequent podcast? Was it an effective way of introducing and teaching your subject?

Making an Effective Educational Blog for the Classroom

1. Decide on a host for your educational blog. A simple search on a search engine will give you several platforms. Edublogs, blogger.com and Wordpress.com are all currently free. Edublogs are specifically for an educational setting and you can control what the students post, who can read their posts and who can respond to them.

2. Look at other blogs to get an idea of what you want to accomplish. If you want this to be effective, you must have a clear goal in mind. Any forum that has you posing questions or situations and having your students respond is usually an easy way to get started. Think of blogs like an online version of journal writing except with a much larger audience.

3. Create a teacher blog that has full administrative control of the other blogs in your sphere.

4. Depending on the age group, either create or have the students create and customize their own blogs. Depending on the site host you use, you have several different levels of control over what happens with the students' blogs. Read the site's FAQ or directions on what they offer. From there you can decide more specifically what you want to do.

5. Type, edit and create your blog.

Tips & Warnings

• Everything for the blogs can be done for free. If you want to pay for the upgraded service, you will of course get additional features. However, I have used the free versions and my students have had a lot of fun and learned quite a bit at the same time.

• If you decide to use the educational blogs in the classroom, be very careful to get parent permission for the students to participate. Respect parents' wishes on whether or not they want their child to produce/participate online or not and have an alternate assignment available if they are against it.

References

• Podcasting in the Classroom
• Making a Podcast
• 10 ways to Blog in the Classroom

Resources

• Audacity
• iTunes
• Edublogs