Podcast Trifecta

In my search for podcasts I came across the useful and useless alike. There seems to be a lot of podcasts out there surrounding every facet of education. After several hours of listening and watching podcasts, I decided to subscribe to three podcasts that would be helpful to my journey as an educator.

First, I subscribed to the NPR Education Podcast. Since I listen to NPR everyday and appreciate their articles focused on education, I thought that this would be a nice way to keep up with the episodes on education without having to sit through the fundraiser advertisements every few months.

Second, I found some wonderful podcasts on TED Talks, a video podcast from the TED "think-tank." TED is all about the sharing and collaborating over ideas that are important to our society. According to the website, TED describes itself as a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED website). As educators, the ideas that TED tackles affect how we approach our jobs and teach in this ever-changing world. Plus, some of the speakers are pretty cool.

Finally, I choose to subscribe to a podcast created by two teachers from St. Louis, Missouri. The show is known as The Tech Teachers, and the two hosts of the show put together a great program. As a teacher new to podcasts, it was wonderful to see how these two teachers could make a podcast informative and appealing to audiences. I figured that this show could serve as an example of what a person might work toward in creating a show of one's own.

Although all of these podcasts serve more as professional development and information resources on technology and ideas, I doubt that they would be very useful for my students. Thus, I created a link and RSS feed to Grammar Girl on my English class blog. I am hoping that the podcasts from this site would help my students with additional information concerning grammar usage. Plus, it would probably much more interesting for them anyway.