Jornades de Llengües in Girona
I'm in Girona, Spain delivering two session on using podcasts in language teaching – the first of these was this evening and was in a mixture of Catalan and Spanish. The second is tomorrow morning, so I'm trying to get a bit ahead of myself and putting up the notes and links from the presentation in advance.
We started by looking at the excellent "Podcasting in Plain English" video from CommonCraft.com (Catalan-subtitled version here) and discussing what podcasting involves.
Finding and subscribing to podcasts
We then looked at how to find podcasts and subscribe to them either via a web search (including podcast directories such as LearnOutLoud and PodcastDirectory) or through iTunes. The screengrabs below show the steps involved in subscribing to a podcast in iTunes:
Download iTunes here. Remember that it is possible to change the iTunes Store country from the homepage of the iTunes Store. Scroll to the bottom and select the appropriate country. Although you will not be able to purchase music, tv shows or films (unless you have a credit card registered to an address in that country) you will be able to access podcasts within the store.
Creating podcasts
Having learned how to access podcasts, we considered how to create a podcast. The example was given using Apple's Garageband software, but similar results can be achieved with Audacity which can be downloaded free. Two example podcasts were created and uploaded to libsyn. The examples can be downloaded here and here (I hope Joana and Josep don't mind their interviews being featured around the world!) A popular alternative to libsyn with options for free accounts is podomatic.
Why should we be using podcasts in languages education?
Useful links about education podcasting can be found below:
- Teacher José Picardo's wonderful walkthrough, Podcasting in Five Easy Steps
- Teacher Joe Dale's podcasting links
- Catalan podcast directory
- Fem un podcast from MediaWiki
- Links to the Radio Lingua site, Coffee Break Spanish and One Minute Catalan
Ara, en català: com ja he dit, que perdoneu les fallades! Espero que les presentacions hagin estat interessants i útils. Aquest matí, després de la meva presentació he fet un volt per Girona i em va agradar molt. Espero tornar i passar més temps al descobrir la vostra ciutat! Moltes gràcies per haver-me convidat a parlar i fins la propera vegada!
Saw Kenneth Branagh act in Chekhov’s Ivanov at Wyndham’s Theatre last night. Brilliant production – your Twitter message made me think you’d have liked it!
P.S. Me encanta CBS – muchisimas gracias!
Good article with quite a few good links here. I will be giving a similar presentation soon (though for a small public) on the Educational power of Podcasting as well.
I was wondering if the slides of your presentation are available somewhere. Would love to have a look at them, you never know I might learn something I didn’t know yet.
Regards,
Stefaan