I’ve used podcasts in the classroom and for my own personal enjoyment for a long time now. In fact, over the past 12 months or so, I’ve painted several rooms in my house, made countless dinners, and reshingled the henhouse while listening to several different podcasts. One of my favorite sites is The New Yorker magazine.
I appreciate the way in which they use podcasts to hook me into listening, and I can see how both ways could be used to hook students into learning just like printed materials and video. The first way is simply providing interesting material. One of my favorite podcasts on the site is noted authors reading short stories by other authors who have influenced them. There are also reviews of films, books, and plays.
The other way The New Yorker uses podcasts is to “tease” me into reading the articles in the weekly issue of the magazine. One of the editors interviews contributing writers and journalists, discussing how they developed and pursued their stories…about politics, war, history, the arts, whatever. They don’t read the article from the magazine, but they talk about it in a way to make it interesting enough for me to seek it out and read it later, which of course means I have to be a subscriber to have access.
Finding material for the classroom will not be difficult. There are podcasts available in just about any subject area in which I teach.