5 Podcast Recs for Educators | March Edition
By: Noah Geisel
Tags: Teaching, Podcast Recommendations, Education, Podcast, Podcast Review

A lot of people don’t have the time or interest to consume several dozen podcasts each month. I do. These are some of the best episodes (in no particular order) I heard in March that I recommend to Educators.

What’s the Point | #37 52 Postcards

Click the podplayer link below or last link in this review to listen

I love this pod about data and, as an educator, this episode is one of my favorites that they’ve done. The guests talk about a project they did in which they sent sent each other a postcard each week for one year. The novel aspect is that the front of the postcard featured a data visualization and the back had a legend to understanding it.

Each week, the collaborators would establish a theme (laughter or thank yous, for example) and track data around that theme. What data they tracked was up to each so there was a lot of variety. How they visually represented the data was also an individual decision. Check out their full gallery here.

This episode is important because Data Visualization (#dataviz) is important. Data tells stories and there are good jobs that aren’t threatened by outsourcing and automation for people who can tell those stories in accessible ways. I’ve had several employers tell me that the ability to make infographics and other data visualizations is a highly valued skill. One Easter egg with this episode is the host’s challenge for listeners to track a week of their own podcast listening and mail him a data visualization postcard representing it.

Reply All | #59 Good Job, Alex

As a show about the Internet, Reply All almost always has something that educators can bend to be relevant to teaching and learning. That task is a pretty light lift with this episode.

The plot is that an author has reached out to PJ and Alex for tech support after finding out that when she didn’t renew her domain registration, someone else swooped in and bought her name dot com. So now, if a reader goes to search for her, they find a Japanese advertisement instead of her web page. Alex goes to work, hunting down the new domain owner in an attempt to recover her url.

This story has a great Digital Citizenship (#digcit) lesson that is probably missing from most instruction even though it’s really important: As good an idea as it is to buy your name dot com, that due diligence only works if you maintain ownership of the domain. There is also a good Future Ready lesson here as the investigation exposes a whole industry that most of us have never heard of and that didn’t exist twenty years ago.

EdGotGame | GBL: Teaching with Alternative Reality

Click the podcast player link below to listen or visit the BAM Radio Network site

This 10 minute pod got the geek in me really excited. The guest, John Fallon, shared a brief background on what Alternate Reality Games (ARG) are and how they got started. He then gives examples from his own classroom about how ARGs can look.

If you’re into playful learning and/or gamification, this is a delicious listen that will probably lead to you committing many hours in the coming days and nights to designing some of your own game clues to create your own alternative overlay to everyone else’s reality. A key takeaway: Start small with 1–2 clues before diving in deep. John’s website has 5 posts about how he created his own ARG for the Odyssey. Another resource shared was the Ludic Learning blog, where you’ll find detailed posts about that teacher’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ARG.

Side note: the hosts for this episode (Matthew Farber and Steven Isaacs) are two of the most fascinating educators I’ve ever met. If you have the chance to meet either of them at a conference, corner them and hold them hostage for a few minutes worth of questioning and you’ll learn more than you will the rest of the entire conference.

IDEO Futures | Episode 29: Jake Knapp + John Zeratsky from GV

Though this episode aired in February, I heard it in March so I’m including it in this post. If you are an educator who is into Design Thinking, you’ll be glad I did! Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky work at Google Ventures, which I understand to be Google’s internal venture capital arm that buys companies it hopes to grow to one day be worth something with more zeroes than what it paid.

Jake and John just published a hot new book called Sprint that details their protocol for 5 day design sprints. It’s fascinating stuff for anyone interested in human-centered design. One big takeaway for me: 5 interviews is usually enough to capture 80% of the patterns so even though it may feel like not enough, there are diminishing returns to seeking user input from more than 5 people.

Another takeaway for me was something that host Diego Rodriguez said when reflecting on the interview: “It’s not about failing fast, it’s about learning fast.” As simple as this is, I think it’s profound. Education is over a year deep into an obsession with failure (e.g. “F-A-I-L = First Attempt In Learning”) and I get it. I also believe that in our embrace of failure, many educators are unintentionally accepting failure for failure’s sake and that does a disservice to students. Failure is not inherently something to cherish; it’s lone value proposition is in offering lessons from which we can learn. Failing fast is worthless unless it is quickly followed by rebounding, reflecting and retrying. The always elegant Diego was of course able to communicate this idea in just 6 syllables and that’s why I hope to one day share a beer with the guy while he tells me about the idea gold in them hills beyond the Flatirons.

Love + Radio | Deep Stealth Mode

22:50 of intrigue. This one may push your comfort zone.

This is another February episode I didn’t get to until March. It originally appeared on a podcast I’d never heard of called Here Be Monsters (15 hours of binge listening awaits you on SoundCloud if you like what you hear here) and fans of Love + Radio will immediately see why it’s a good fit.

I don’t want to ruin the episode for anyone who goes ahead and listens so I’ll just say this: Transgender issues impact teaching and learning beyond a current events discussion about reality TV. It impacts our colleagues, learners and families in ways to which most of us are likely oblivious because those around us are in Stealth Mode. While this story is about one person and not an entire demographic, it does offer listeners insight to a point of view that will be entirely new to most. And maybe, as a result of hearing this, if someone close to you comes out of Stealth Mode, you’ll be better prepared to serve them by being the best you that you can be for them.