Page 1 of 5 Trinity University teamed up with Teach for America to provide a Masters in Education program for some of its teachers in Washington, D.C. Throughout the month of June, I taught 28 young, eager teachers—mostly of special education students—how to better utilize technology in the classroom. Special for their idealism and desire to give of themselves, these teachers are part of a program that resolves to remove inequity in our education system. On its own web site, the Teach for America mission is described this way:
Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in ensuring educational equity and excellence for all children. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort.
Our class took place at McKinley Technology High School, an urban school just off North Capitol Street. Working in a Mac lab full of lovely G5 iMacs, we tackled my usual Teacher Technology syllabus: WebQuests (with of course, Web Standards and 508 accessibility features!), Kidspirations, software evaluations, teacher blogs, and iMovie videos.
When the students set up their free teacher blog/web sites at edublogs.org, they were very excited by the possibilities, but expressed concern over the fact that many of their students had only rudimentary reading skills. They wanted to augment the blogs with another way to communicate with their students. Hence we embarked upon podcasting, a kind of syndicated audio blog that listeners can subscribe to and download to their computers or MP3 players.
See Joel Martinez's Podcasting 101 article to learn more about the fundamentals of podcasting.
First I wanted to let my students experience some podcasts, particularly educational podcasts like "French for Beginners," a podcast I subscribe to so that my son can practice his French during the summer. Subscribing to a podcast lets iTunes (or other "podcatchers") automatically download new episodes at time intervals you designate in the podcast category of the iTunes preferences.
It is easy to find and subscribe to podcasts if you have a free copy of iTunes, which has versions for both Mac and Windows users:
Image 1: Go to the Apple Music Store and choose the
podcast genre to search and subscribe to free podcasts in various categories
Tip: If you do not have or want iTunes, you can download iPodder, a cross-platform podcast receiver.
In addition to the iTunes music store, there are many podcast directories out there, such as podcast.net and podcastalley.com that you can browse to find podcasts on every conceivable topic.
So now you have a podcast address that you obtained from a site you frequent, or one that you found at a podcast directory. Once you have an address, you can subscribe by using this iTunes menu: Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast
Image 2: Use the Advanced menu to subscribe to podcasts
for which you have an address
Image 3: Enter the podcast address, click OK, and that's
it! You're subscribed
Keywords
podcasting, education, special ed, xml, rss, audio, mp3, Audacity, LAME, iTunes, iPodder, RSS feeds, enclosure tag, ID3 tags, audio editing
