My First Podcast!

Get me! Used Audacity to record a short sound bite of myself speaking using my recently purchased Logitec headphones, saved the file. Created an account with www.podomatic.com where the MP3 file could be uploaded to. Then sent the html text via it's "share" facility to my own blog! How great is that. (For those of you who don't want to use 3rd party applications to upload sound files use typepad.com for your blog. It costs a small amount but I'm assured it's a bit more flexible than blogger in terms of sound files etc...). A big thanks to Joe Dale for pointing me in the right direction with this and for the earlier Audacity tutorial. I see no end of possibilities ahead with personal or classroom use. No webcam use means no child protection issues (although I will double check that as one cannot be too careful these days). I might trial a webcam version of myself too, but that can wait until I've washed my hair...

I love playlist.com! Check out my current use on my other "just for fun" blog: http://thewonderfulworldofesther.blogspot.com/ (make sure you have your sound on). However I really want to use this on a classroom blog but with French music.

As a filler I sometimes access http://www.mcm.net/programmes/top50/ to enrich my student's knowledge of the French Top 50 in a desire to a) provide some intercultural understanding of the target country of the language we are learning, but also b) to destroy the myth that French music is not "cool" (I'm not allowed to say "hip and happening" - no one says "hip and happening", my year 9 1.2 class told me so). The dominance of English and American cultures has a lot to answer for in terms of the lack of appreciation of foreign music in the eyes of our youth.

We choose a song to play, hopefully with a video to accompany it, from the Top 50 French charts (refusing point blank to play any anglo/US music despite the agonising adolescent pleas), then I ask them what they think with a show of thumbs. Some groups and singers have come up trumps so far - check out the weblink list on the right under "Music Matters" (Kidtonik is an S-Club juniors equivalent don't you know).

I wanted to develop this further by searching for our favourites on playlist.com in order to create a specific French music playlist for a classroom blog. However no searches provide fruitful, apart from Vanessa Paradis or MC Solaar which, although current artists, are not proving that motivating for my pupils.

Any ideas to help with my search for modernity welcome...