I would like to start off my saying that after this week I am really interested and motivated to use podcasts! Prior to this week I have searched online and tried to find good podcasts to listen to, but was somewhat unsuccessful. However, after reading our text book I decided to download and use I Tunes. I have used I Tunes on my school computer to play cds in my class, but never realized the large amount of other things you can do with I Tunes. Navigating through I Tunes was simple and easy. After I clicked on the podcasts button, I was amazed and shocked by how many podcasts there were to choose. I found it to be a bit overwhelming that there were so many to pick from. I did not know where to begin and just decided to search through them all to see what was available. I must admit it was helpful that I Tunes has the podcasts separated by certain categories like: arts, business, comedy, education, games, health, and many more. I started listening to a few different ones and most of them were very informative and fun to listen to.

The podcast that I decided to follow for the week was called: Learn Italian Podcast. I decided to choose this podcast because I always thought it would be neat to learn how to speak Italian. I noticed that this podcast was updated with a new podcast about every 5 to 6 days. Each podcast would review what the previous podcast taught and would then begin with a new lesson. The lesson would be directed on one small topic. For example some of the podcast taught: How to say what’s up, how to ask what you do, a grocery list in Italian, telling a joke in Italian, etc. The podcasts would carry a conversation with a man and woman who were going back in forth speaking. The only difficult thing for me was that the speaking was so fast. It would have been helpful for me to have the speaker talk a lot slower and give time for the listener to practice saying the words back. The podcasts were all between 5 to 9 minutes and they quickly introduced the words and went right into an intermediate understanding of how to say the words. I would like to continue listening to this podcast to see if the more I listen to it if I would be able to pick up and actually say some phrases in Italian.

Along with continuing to listen to this podcast, I plan on searching I Tunes for other topics that interest me and other podcasts, both audio and video, that I can incorporate into my classroom.