The educational podcast from ITunes that I would like to talk about is from Sesame Street. It was a podcast about the word "ingredient". Initially, I did not want to use a Sesame Street podcast, because I knew it would be quite good and I might not have much to critique. After trying unsuccessfully to find a video podcast that would be good for my target audience I gave up and looked up Sesame Street.
I saw a really terrible podcast from Sprout that was from "The Good Night Show". It was 14 minutes of visuals of people sleeping accompanied by soft, relaxing music. I can understand wanting to use relaxing music to help put your child to sleep, but having visual stimulation will be disruptive to that goal. There were also intermittent sounds, like a snore or a bird chirping that interrupted the tranquility of the music and would be disruptive to a child trying to drift off to sleep. At the very end of the podcast instead of just ending quietly (because by this time the child should be asleep, right?) a loud Spout jingle that was nothing at all like the peaceful music from the preceding 14 minutes pops on. I think this too would have awakened a child. This was just one of the discouraging podcasts, among the several I watched, that eventually pushed me into the arms of good-old, reliable Sesame Street.
The podcast I am using was all about the word "ingredient". It included several sections that focused on that word and what it means. I don't think this content was originally intended to be a podcast in and of itself. I think the sections were probably originally interspersed throughout an entire episode of Sesame Street and they were then smashed together to make the podcast. This podcast was also seven minutes long, which is much longer than any segment I have ever seen on Sesame Street...and far too long for a pre-schooler aimed podcast about a single, very specific topic. If they had to produce a podcast that was that certain length, I think the division of the topic into several smaller sections was its saving grace.
I'll start with the parts that I think did not support cognitive development:
One section of the podcast was about a minute and a half. In it they said the word "ingredient" 23 times and gave the definition of the word five times. While I do not think it falls strictly under the Redundancy Principle that Mayer and Moreno write about, which mentions having text and narration that say the same thing running concurrently, I think the word and definition were used far too many times and started to become extraneous information. I think even a pre-schooler would begin to notice how often the word was said and begin to notice that versus what the podcast is actually trying to say.
Below are some of the elements that I did like and I thought were beneficial to reducing cognitive overload.
The creators of this podcast used the Signaling Principle through their judicious use of text.
They had the word "ingredient" appear textually on the screen several times when it was said and used it as a pointer word (though I am glad they did not employ this method in the section where the word was said excessively). As I said in the first paragraph, though the podcast was long it was divided well by using the Segmenting Principle. Each section was about a minute and a half to two minutes long and offered bite sized bits of information. Each section said basically the same thing, but did it in a just different enough way that the podcast was not boring. By the final section of the podcast the key word "ingredient" had been used enough throughout the earlier sections that it could start becoming prior knowledge. The podcast creators also employed the Modality Principle. By and large, words were presented in spoken form with animation, not text. The only time "ingredient" appeared on the screen was when it was being used as a pointer word. There was no extraneous text that would be distracting to children who are just learning to read.
Overall, I think this podcast was well done. I did have issues with some of its elements, but as I said earlier, Sesame Street is a reliable source for quality educational programming.
