Podcasts!

Podcasts are amazing!

What it is.
Hey! Podcasts are amazing! You can listen to them anywhere: in your car on your way to school, while brushing your teeth or even on the treadmill while pulling a hard workout! Then, there is the endless possibility of pressing pause and rewind until you finally understand what is going on. Fill up those little gaps in your life with great conversations on great topics, learn English, and work on your assignents at the same time! Now that's what I call being EFFICIENT!

I have landed upon a gold mine of free podcasts with the CBC Radio. They are real live shows that discuss current topics ranging from news, arts, politics, technology, the world, music and more! Nothing like the overformatted-miserably acted-English as a Second Language (ESL) tapes that we usually use in ESL classes.

Weekly Feed.
I will try to link each of our weekly readings and opiniated discussions to a discussion on a similar topic that one of the radio shows broadcasted! I will add a few questions for you to answer and fuel the debates that started in class! Although some shows generally are lentghy, I will direct your attention to a specific time in the podcast (and limit it to 5-15 minutes max!) where you will have to focus your listening, maybe get some help (chat with me and classmates online) and post comments.

How it works.
We will only work with the CBC Radio Podcasts. In the "Podcast Me Away" rubric to the right of the class blog, you will find a link to the CBC Radio Podcasts Website. There you can see all the shows that have podcasts (all of the CBC show have them).

The easiest way to get a podcast is to subscribe to the specific show that made it using iTunes (If not everyone in class has it you can download it for free on the Apple website). Just click on the iTunes icon under the description of the radio show featured that week and it will automatically upload the content that you can download in iTunes. Then (on iTunes) all you have to do is look for the show assigned for the week. Click GET, put it on your iPod or other Mp3 device, and let yourself be taken away!

You can also individually download each podcast using the web page (not in iTunes) but they take forever to download and you cannot always take them with you on your iPod or other Mp3 player.

This Week's Podcast. (ASSIGNMENT)
This week we will listen to DNTO's "When did you get "lost in Translations"" that hit the air January 2nd, 2010!

I will give you further information about the specific interviews that I want you to listen to shortly.