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First of all, a thorough exploration of podcasting can be found at the Wikipedia and entering podcasting. The article begins with a basic definition that can be misleading:

Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod" and "broadcasting", is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically. It first became popular in late 2004, used largely for audio files.

The problem with this statement is that it implies that Podcasting is an Apple/iPod thing. The fact is that there is nothing about podcasting that is Apple or iPod specific. It did come, largely, out of the Mac community, but the essentials of podcasting are:

  1. Somebody records audio information,
  2. Saves the information as an MP3 file & uploads it to the Internet, and
  3. People listen to the audio program using some audio player, either computer-based or a portable media player.

Here are some selected Connect Learning Podcasts

Click the link to listen to the podcast. Right-click to link and select to load the page into another window or tab if you which to keep this page available. You can also right-click on the link to download the audio file.

I recently facilitated a workshop on Educational Podcasting on Long Island. Near the end of the workshop, I ask teachers to describe ideas that they had had during to session for using podcasting in their classes. One teacher suggested reading and recording books, and then making them available to less proficient readers and ESL students. I agreed that this was a great idea, but mentioned that there might be some copyright issues. Being a librarian, she promised to look into that, and she consulted with librarian Sarah Chaucer, author of the web site, Digital Pencil.

Here is the text of Sarah's response.