Thing #22 - Podcasts

Podcasting can serve two purposes: students can listen to them, as I have been doing this week, to learn new things. Great for auditory learners. They can also create their own podcasts to show what they have learned and to teach others. I've been listening to those types of podcasts, as well. Today, I subscribed to The French Podcast, conducted by a native speaker and frequently updated, that will help me improve my fast fading French. I have 99 episodes at my disposal! And, I can listen and work on something else (well, for French I do have to concentrate a little harder, so I won't be working on much). I found this resource through The Education Podcast Network, which is a wonderful site and full of some great podcasts. It is produced by educators to bring podcast programming together in one place in an effort to help teachers use 21st century technology in the classroom. There is a side bar that lists podcasts created by students and classrooms and some of them are just wonderful. In fact, all the feeds I listened to were very well done, even by children as young as 8. I did find that some of the links no longer existed and some of the feeds were several years old, but I believe the content was still appropriate.

I heard a group of children in Australia video podcasting about technology, a father and son discuss favorite books, and a class of 4th-graders in Nebraska talk about renewable energy. That's another Wow! for me. The side bar also includes lists of podcasts by subject matter and this is where I found The French Podcast. I would highly recommend the EPN site for educators. Last week, I came across a site called Absolutely Intercultural when I was looking for blogs and I subscribed to it. It comes from Germany and is really informative. I mentioned it in an earlier post. I also looked at Podcast Alley but thought EPN was much easier to use and more suited to educators.

Finding and listening to podcasts does inspire me to create one of my own. I'm thinking that our Stallions READ book club might like to create one next year to talk about the Tayshas books. We could do one a week...hmmmm..