I've heard recently that podcasting is the most rapidly adopted new
technology. At a technology in education conference last week, a presenter
asked the audience how many people were reading or teaching with blogs and
only a few raised their hands, but many more were using podcasts, and some
had even created them. 

I attended a workshop this afternoon at TESOL by Aiden Yeh. She teaches
English in Taiwan, and she is one of those techno-enthusiasts who tries
out everything. Her English classes have a Yahoo group for posting
documents and sending email, a blog site for her class blog, and Podomatic
page for posting student podcasts.

She demonstrated www.podomatic.com, a site that allows you to create and
post your own podcasts. Aiden uses it with her students, and you can see
her home page at http://aidenyeh.podOmatic.com/. You can listen to her
students' speech assignments, and read their comments to each other. If
you scroll down and start from the bottom you can see how the page has
developed. 

In about 10 minutes of playing around with this site, I had my own podcast
posted. (It's at marianthacher.podomatic.com, but so far it's just an
experiment. If I had a few more minutes in the workshop I could have added
a musical intro and outro using the sites "mixomatic" feature.) The only
hardware we needed was a microphone. You can see the possibilities! Aiden
made a podcast of her course description and syllabus for students to
download and listen to.

One feature I liked is that it's very easy to subscribe to any podomatic
site as an RSS feed, or through iTunes. This makes it easy to get notified
of new podcasts when they are posted, and to download them to an mp3
player if you wish.

Anyone else using Podomatic? Or do you have other suggestions for free
podcasting sites?

Marian Thacher
OTAN
www.otan.us