Podcast

MOBILE LEARNING

In the last weeks we are storing a lot of ways of learning English and here again, we explored a goldmine of online materials to improve it. We have to keep in mind ( I often forget it!!) that we can use these tools for any other language we are studying...Somehow they are trasversal tools!!So, always consider them!

Podcasts (and vodcasts) can easily downloaded into our PC or personal MP3 player of any type: this is the reason why they can be exploited by anyone…I mean, most of us have an MP3 player, a computer, a cell and the possibility of using such common technologies makes listening to audio files really easy and ordinary!
Podcasts can be listened wherever, whenever and however we want: mobility is their main advantage; they can be short (lasting few minutes) or long (lasting more then an hour); their contents can be free and, if we subscribe through an RSS subscription, every new podcast available is downloaded automatically to our PC (useful, isn't it?!).

Someone in the web wrote that for students they are "mobile learning".
Really, we can learn through listening, no matter where we are, and if sometimes we don’t feel like reading, now we can do exercise anyway…and (what is more interesting) we can listen not only to audio files about grammar but also about dialogue, real life episodes, audio books, news and so on!

Here you are three podcasts which I chose.

• In English as a Second Language (ESL) there are dozens of MP3 files which can be downloaded or simply listened to and read. Each of them has: its own title and short sentences explaining the content, the speaker’s name.


• Another website for our listening practise could be this one which contains many podcasts about real conversation whose topics range from food to adverts. You can also download the conversation transcription (in PDF format as well).


• The last one contains podcasts about audio books. Every title is followed by its author’s name. There is a useful menu on the left side of the page where books are divided into three macro-categories (fiction, children, non-fiction); each of them contains sub-categories further divided into sub-genres (e.g. Fiction-thrillers-ghosts). When you have chosen what kind of book you want to read, there are few key-words or sentences describing the content.