Thing 22: Podcasts

I liked the Podcastdirectory.com best because I liked the indexing by topics the site provided.  Once you selected a topic, Education, and went down to a subcategory like Education Technology, the subsequent page opened up into a nicely laid out index of all the podcasts for that subcategory.  Each site had an icon or picture and a brief description.  The Educational Podcast Directory was much harder to navigate but I did like the fact that it included podcast by students or from classrooms.  The Learn Out Loud directory was also good and gave me several podcasts focused more towards adults and high school or college students.  PodcastAlley.com was an okay site, nothing all that spectacular and not well organized, just very long lists of podcast titles listed under various subcategories.

Listening to an elementary grade podcast I found using the Educational Podcast Directory I listened to several students retell a story accompanied by pictures from the book.  Here is one of my favorites by a younger child (kindergarten or 1st grade) reading Caterpillar, Caterpillar.  Another great one was a younger child reading Hedgehog is Hungry.  It is very easy to see a classroom application just by listening to these two student podcasts.  In addition to using podcasts in reading it would be a great way to narrate a social studies story the student could create.  They could create a podcast describing the Civil War (as if they were reporting on a radio) or narrate the Lewis and Clark Expedition as either of these two men or as Sacajawea.  Student could outline the process of photosynthesis via podcast of pretend they are recording scientific observations during an exploration through the Amazon Rainforest (some great ideas from some podcast entitled Science from the Wild Side narrated by an adult but students could easily do something similar).