What it is: A podcast is a digital media recording that can be saved on and distributed over the Internet.
How to use Podcasting in your classroom: Use a podcast to record students reading. This can be used for reading records, for pronunciation, and reading fluency. Students, teachers, and parents can listen to reading records recorded over the course of the school year for fluency and progress made. Podcasts can also be used to share news with students and families, guest speakers, student presentations, student produced podcasts, lessons, assessment, digital stories, motivation, auditory learners, celebrating student work, interactive media center, a tool to help struggling students, to provide a “window” to your classroom for parents, and to show student growth at parent teacher conferences.
Tips: Podcasts can be created using several programs such as Apple’s Garageband (this application comes standard on Macintosh computers), Audacity which is a free open source software for recording and editing sounds, and My Podcast where podcasts can be recorded and hosted for free.
Podcasting is great for second language learners too. We used Audacity and my class had so much fun recording themselves reading in Hebrew, changing pitch for different characters and adding sound effects!
Audacity is a great tool! Have you tried using Myana (by Aviary) yet? It is a free podcast recorder, too, and has some excellent features!