Podcasts in Education

For quite some time, I've hand a keen interest in the educational potential of podcasting. I've listened several podcasts and vodcasts, mainly through iTunes U, for my own personal enrichment and I've considered using them in some of the classes I teach.

To give a little background about myself: I teach science at a community college in Pennsylvania. Teaching at a community college is different than teaching at an elementary or secondary school or even at any other college. Most of my students are part time learners and there is a wide variety of ages, raging from eighteen to fifty. I have a higher percentage of adult learners than an ordinary college and most of my students are not science majors. They are taking my class in order to meet the continuing education requirements for an associate's or transfer degree program.

As a result, one thing that I am keenly aware of, is that many adult learners are not as techniologically savy as younger students. One thing I would like to do is introduce podcasts as a learning tool, but I'm concerned that many of my students will be intimidated by such things.

The other issue I have concerns about is how to maximize the use of podcasts as a teaching aid. My goal is to use them to reinforce some of my lessons. I find that the subjects I teach often require visual aids, so I was thinking of creating vodcasts using a screen capture program such as Camtasia to produce short vodcast about certain topics.

So, my two questions are:

1) How to reassure the technophobes that vodcasts are not scary.

2) What techniques are most effective in creating short vodcasts PowerPoints? Flash animations? Lectures? A combination of these?

If anyone has any experience with using vodcasts as a teaching aid, I'd greatly appreciate any advice you could offer.