My first thought upon looking at podcasts was "Help!" I fished around a bit for the tutorial which was a bit too techy, though I am not, and never have been, a "Flashing 12." I found a better description with less distractions on the page at the NPR Podcast Directory Help. What was most confusing to me was whether or not one needed podcast software like iTunes and the discovery exercise direction to subscribe to a podcast using an RSS feed. I've still not found that little orange RSS button anywhere on the podcast pages I saw. However, I was successful with the assignment.
A bit defeated by my inability to locate an RSS button, I decided to look at using iTunes for my podcast of Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me! from NPR. I clicked the iTunes button, the iTunes store appeared, I clicked on the free "purchase" and voila, there it was in iTunes. It was quite simple and I began to wonder why I had thought this would be difficult.
Not willing to give up on using an RSS feed and Google Reader, I decided thatI would pit my talents against this challenge and figure it out. I prowled among the entries of my classmates for clues and hit upon purpleglassesclub who has been a wonderful inspiration throughout this course. You can blame her for helping me understand the hyperlink tool and my hyperactivity in using it. "Hmmm," thought I, "if she can embed this link in her blog, perhaps I can embed the link in Google Reader." So I tried it ... and it worked! What link did I cheerfully steal? Why that of Children's Literature with Daniel Pinkwater. I then went back and did the same with "Wait, Wait" and am now free of iTunes (which is incredibly slow on my computer) and I will see all the new entries when I log into Google Reader. I suppose one benefit of using iTunes over Google Reader is that my husband can listen to the "Wait" podcasts without having to go into Google Reader. We'll have to wait a bit to see how the new week downloads to iTunes. An interesting note, when subscribing through iTunes, I got only the latest broadcast, but when subscribing through Google Reader, I got everything back to December, 2007.
Did I find anything useful? My main thrust was figuring out the tool and I was so busy doing that, thoughts of my students went into suspended animation. I think using podcasts for research could be very interesting especially for very current topics where books are not available. NPR frequently covers a topic over a number of days giving very complete and balanced coverage. Subscribing to a podcast would alleviate time spent searching for the broadcast and send it to the student's computer. I'm not sure where I would go with this tool in an elementary school. Looking more closely at the Educational Podcast Directory would be a place to start, but for now I know there isn't a computer in my domain that can handle this tool, so I will have plenty of time to think.
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Right back at you, Bookwoman!
You've been an inspiration to me as well. I hope we will meet up at a MSLA event sometime. When we make nametags, we'll have to include our aliases. :-)
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