Thing 19. Podcasts

Here is a great podcast on grammar. It's a dull topic, but this podcast is great. As a former English teacher, I appreciate it when someone can make grammar interesting, and this does it. I subscribed to it in iTunes, but I'm not sure I like it when iTunes automatically downloads things. It bogs my Internet down at home.

I was interested in listening to the Saint Cloud State podcast too. They were actually just starting it when I saw a conference session with them at MEMO this fall. The key with these is promoting it enough so people actually listen to them. Otherwise, it's a little discouraging to put in all the work and not have anyone listen to them. I subscribed to this one too.

I've looked at some subscriptions in iTunes too. That's pretty easy to use. There is something for everyone there.

I dug around a little and found the spot to submit my own podcast, but it wanted a RSS feed. I now know more about those, but I don't know how to make one. How do I make a RSS feed, so I could syndicate my own podcasts? We've had students make podcasts at our school using Audacity, but we've only posted them on our local website. That works well for us, but how would we go about making them available for subscription? I'll need to investigate more to figure that out. I believe we can host them locally and still put them on iTunes. Maybe we'd need to enter a new url for each podcast. I also believe there is a way to password protect it. I'd like that too. People could subscribe but only get the podcast with our local password and login. That would make parents more comfortable. I believe Buffalo is doing something like that.

The other thing we post weekly on our website at school is our 10 minutes weekly newscast done by students. It would be neat to put that up on iTunes as well.