Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Podcasting and application to foreign language

Well, if you like blogging, and if you like IPods, you'll love Podcasting. I guess there is a way now to post an audio file, have it feed (through rss, just like our blogs) into other people's computers. They can then download your daily, or weekly, or whatever, audio file into their IPods and listen to it. If you want to read more, here's a news article.

How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!

Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
"..now let's take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class."

Let's continue this discussion. How could you use this technology in your teaching? Now, I know IPods are expensive and not very many have them. But eventually they will be as cheap as $10 walkmans. So let's think futuristically here.

In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
"But Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."