Week 11, Thing 22: Podcasts

#22: Discover some useful search tools for locating podcasts.

Podcasts are one of those things I have heard of but never took time to learn about, so this "thing" will be good inducement for that. Naturally I started out by going to every link on the lesson page. I enjoyed the Springfield Town Library Children's Room podcasts. I tried out all the Book Beginnings quizzes and did pretty well. (What a relief! If I had failed that might mean I was not good at my job!) At the PLCMC Teen Pages I listened to an author talk about how he got the idea for one of his books (which I read a few years ago) and at the Denver Public Library site I listened to a few picture books being read in their entirety. I listened to a story being told at the Orange County Library System site and, since it's a folktale that I've read to kids myself, it was interesting to hear how someone else told it. I think I could put the podcasts from the Worthington Libraries to good use for planning kindergarten and preschool storytimes -- they have children's rhymes and songs recorded. So if I forget the words to Five Little Ducks, I'm all set. My iPod was already plugged into the computer so I decided it would be a good time to see how the iTunes podcast thing works. I downloaded a few things to iTunes on my computer that sounded like they might be interesting to listen to, but not everything could then be transferred to my iPod. I can see I might have to read some instructions so I'll know how to tell which will work and which won't. I went to several of the other podcast directories that were linked in this lesson. The user-friendliness varied and some of them would not be wise to open up in a school setting, but others seemed OK. The Education Podcast Network sounded promising, but I was a little flummoxed by how some things were categorized. I tried the Information Skills category and included in it were such things as Just Baby Names, The Business Side of Music, and How to Sell Your Car. Somehow none of these fit under my definition of information skills. The last site I checked out looked quite useful: the SirsiDynix Institute's free web seminars. The ones I thought sounded interesting were all an hour long, though, so I'll wait until I'm ready to digest that much info. I did subscribe to a few sites with podcasts by using RSS feeds. I may go back and also try subscribing to one using iTunes just to see how that would work and which method I prefer. I don't think I'd want to deal with all the copyright issues involved in recording whole books, and I also don't see that as being something my library needs at this point. But I could see having students do brief book review podcasts or making up book-related quizzes for other kids to try. When I decide I'm ready to take on creating podcasts, I'll go back and go through the tutorials, but for now I'll settle for figuring out how to find them and what to do with them. I can see that a good resource for the future would be the Podcasting – Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki page.