Week 9, Thing 21

I've been downloading podcasts for a few years. My daughter has an IPod and my husband and I have Mp3 players. I've downloaded a few radio shows and some of my music cd's. It's great on long car rides and even during medical tests where I've had to lay still for 45 minutes. I'm a visual learner though, so YouTube is more my style.

I was a little disappointed with podcast.net. It was out of date. When I checked on my favorite radio show (Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me), the most recent podcast was December 2006. Yahoo was also disapointing. I guess I expected to be able to listen to the podcast directly from Yahoo, but the site just sends you somewhere else. Podcastalley.com was kind of confusing. It seemed to me that I would need to sign in and create an account at Podshow. The last thing I want now is another account with another username and password. I find it easier to download my podcasts of choice from the NPR website. Maybe this is why ITunes is so popular. It's easy to set up an account and set it up to save certain podcasts, including free ones.

I did have fun on EPN. I found something called YA Cast and added them to my Google homepage. Here's what the site says about them:

"This unique podcast is actually a series of audio book talks on young adult literature. The podcast is written and recorded by pre-service English teachers at Grand Valley State University as part of a literature methods course taught by Dr. Robert Rozema. For more information on how podcasting works or how to create your own book talk podcasts, please contact rozemar@gvsu.edu."

There were a number of booktalks listed. They were fun to listen to and well produced. I'd like to have students booktalk their favorite books and have the podcasts linked to my website. That will have to wait for another day.