Thing 20: Finding and Subscribing to Podcasts

Include in your post the name of at least one podcast to which you subscribed. Describe your experience using the various search tools. Which do you prefer and why?

I have subscribed to Speaking of History. It is a podcast produced by 8th Grade History teacher Eric Langhorst. The episode that caught my eye is Podcast #184 – Creating “Common Craft” Type Videos about Historical Terms for Class. It is a “supercast” with audio, photos, and video! Lee LeFever even left a comment praising the students and Mr. Langhorst on their product.

http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com/2009/03/podcast-184-creating-common-craft-type.html

The process I used to find this podcast was by going to EPN, Subject Specific: Social Studies, Speaking of History, and then scrolling through several episodes until I found one I thought would be useful to me and clicking on it. At first I was a little freaked out because there were probably over 20 with just today’s date. Talk about information overload. I didn’t want to subscribe to something that sent out 20 podcasts a day! Once I subscribed, I could see the actual date of posting. Whew! I think this is a great search tool and plan to use it again in the future.

I did not use iTunes to locate and subscribe to this feed, although I have used iTunes for this purpose in the past. In fact, I think that’s how I found Grammar Girl. I also downloaded from iTunes onto my iPod and burned CDs for my students a podcast called Japanese Survival Phrases before our exchange trip last summer. I was surprised at the number of educational podcasts iTunes carries.

I really like and use NetVibes. I have a tab just for podcasts on my NetVibes page and I want to keep them all there in one “file cabinet” so to speak. So I simply clicked on the orange RSS icon in the podcast I chose, copied the URL (this one is an xml, which from past experience I know works), opened my NetVibes page, clicked on my podcasts tab, and added the feed. Now I can go through all the episodes at my convenience. Can’t wait to get started!!!

http://www.netvibes.com