Podcasts!

This evening’s blog post will be about..you guessed it…PODCASTS!! What’s a podcast you ask? Well, Google defines a podcast as “a digital audio file made available on the Internet for downloading to a computer or portable media player, typically available as a seriesmerchan*.” Basically, a podcast is a recording that somebody made of music or people talking, or anything else that  you might want audio recorded; kind of like a blog, but in all audio form.  A lot of the podcasts that I am subsribed to are for music, for example, I follow Borgore’s (a dubstep artist) weekly radio show to keep up with his music. The possibilities are endless though, just go to iTunes and search podcasts and you can find one for almost anything. A friend of mine has a blog where she only posts podcasts about fitness and her workouts and what she’s going through as she prepares for a bodybuilding competition.

I have listened to a few podcasts recently about how they are being used in classrooms and in libraries. Some that I listened to had kids’ recordings of reports that they had done on famous people or what they want to do when they grow up. I think that a cool way to use podcasts in a library would be to have students create summaries or teasers about books that they like or have read. You could even make a quick one of a student reading a book, download it as an MP3 and then have a collection of student-read audio books! Wouldn’t that be cool? That is similar to what I did in my classroom. (I am embedding a podcast about how I used podcasts this past school year in my 2nd grade classroom and how I have used them in the past.)

So yea, podcasts are pretty cool, I’m excited to see how others are going to use them in classrooms and libraries as well! Anyone wanna share what you have been doing or how you want to use them in your own class or library?