Podcasting

I currently subscribe to two specific podcasts that can be found through itunes. The first is called Conversational Spanish. You can search for this by going to the itunes store and typing in conversational Spanish in the search bar. I have used these podcasts in my classroom already. It gives you 10 different episodes in Spanish, ranging from 2 minutes until about 5 minutes. The people who conduct the podcasts are native speakers of Spanish and speak at the normal native speed, which I like because it gives my students an idea of what they would really hear if they were to travel to a Spanish speaking country. Unfortunately, I do not have access to itunes at my school, so what I did was subscribe to the podcast, which was then saved on my computer at home. I burned all 10 conversations onto a CD and created listening activities for my students, to go along with our current unit. The unit that we were studying at the time was based around phone conversations. Using this podcast was perfect, because there were many episodes which highlighted a phone conversation and which used many of the vocabulary words we were working with. Having my students listen to conversations at native speed was a bit more difficult for them, but it was more authentic. It is very important for them to hear Spanish from native speakers, since they do not get to experience this very often. I also like to use resources outside of the textbook realm as much as possible. These podcasts were up to date on the vocabulary used; a refreshing step away from the older textbooks we have in class.
The second podcast that I currently subscribe to is call Democracy Now, which can also be found on itunes. There is a new podcast downloaded to my home computer everyday, which highlights the political news from around the world, but mostly just the United States. It would be very easy for me to implement this podcast to any unit of study in my classes, especially when discussing current events. But for now, I use this to practice my own Spanish listening skills around the house. I am constantly trying to keep up with my language skill ability, and I think listening to podcasts in a different language is very beneficial, and very easy to access.