You talkin' to me?

Before being in the ITS program, the concept of podcasts were very foreign to me.  Sure, the term is one that has slowly made a name for itself in our culture, but I never fully understood what a podcast truly was.  After some investigation, I discovered that podcasts used to be referred to as "audioblogging." That makes absolute sense to me, especially after learning about blogs and their uses.   But, what I still wanted to figure out was why the concept of a PODcast.  Cast makes sense... like a newscast or a broadcast, but pod? My common sense tells me that Apple may have something to do with it. Seems very interesting to me that an entire concept of technology has been taken over by a company such as Apple, but since so many people began to listen to these RSS feeds on iPods, the language shifted to begin calling them podcasts.

Podcasts are everywhere on the internet.  If you google podcasts, there are about 66,700,000 results. Imagine once you link to all of those sites how many podcasts you could actually access! Just navigating through, I found some really neat podcasts from NPR and am afraid I could spend hours just basking in the glory of all those words.  What's so neat about podcasts is that you can search for anything and find an audioblog that doesn't take more than 15 minutes (on average) to listen to! Some are even less than 5 minutes- perfect time for a class or even just a busy teacher.

When I first began searching for podcasts, I felt a little lost.  The more I meandered, though, I realized it really wasn't that much harder than a google search and being more exact in my search. I figured out it was pretty easy to find free podcasts through iTunes.  So often, I hear podcasts advertised in different realms.  My church even publishes sermons on their website, clearly easily accessible. 

Here's my struggle, though. I see the freedom of podcasts and I understand their benefits, but how do I implement podcasts effectively in my classroom? The learning curve that it will take for me to teach my students how to draft a script, record, and publish a podcast could potentially take weeks. It will take even longer to just get in to a computer lab during testing "season"! When we worked on podcasts with our groups in the ITs cohort, even that was a learning curve. I'm imagining 30 9th grade students clustered around me trying to figure it out....and my brain officially feels like it will explode. 

What if, however, students already knew how to create podcasts and I could implement them seamlessly into my lesson? Or why not use the benefit of Audacity, that many students already use in their foreign language classes, and take it just a step further? I need to remember, too, that these kids are netgenners and the time it will take to teach them anything this "technologically advanced" really won't be that difficult.  The challenge now...what should my students create podcasts about that would really supplement my curriculum?