Reading Prompt V

Do you have an iPod or another type of .mp3 player? If so, have you used it or anything other than listening to your own music, such as downloading and listening to podcasts? Note some of the points McQuillan made about how podcasting can support second language learning. Which of the ideas from the readings would you be interested in trying out in your own classroom?

I don't own an iPod, maybe I am the only person left that doesn't. Of course, I was also one of the last people I knew to buy a cell phone. Anyways, I do have an mp3 player, and have owned it for about seven years. It's about the size of a flashdrive, and I love the thing. I bought it while working in Japan, it cost me about fifty bucks, and I used it daily on my bus or train ride to work. At that time, there was no podcasting, so I just listened to music. I started to hear about podcasting over the past few years, but didn't think much about it until this semester. My classmates Scott and Josh told me that you could download language lessons, and being the Japanophile that I am, of course I have started to use it. It's great! Just like a lot of other things in this class, I kick myself for not finding out about them earlier. I guess I was too busy. So now I have two podcast that I look at regularly, Japanese podcast 101, and learn Japanese podcast. One is professionally done, the other is some guy in an apartment in Tokyo. I like them both.

The McMillan article provided a ton of ideas for using the ipod in language learning. Being able to download audio files, slow them down, adding images to that audio are all basic ideas. The article went on to point out more inventive ways of using it, interviewing native speakers, creating your own original lessons, adding script to your audio files, and finally near the end of the article it even mentioned a web site that I really like for ESL students, Voice of America, which apparently has podcast.

Really though, the McMillan article was informative, because it covered all the basics of what I have missed by not having an ipod. That is, that it can deliver large quantities of data, both audio and visual in a quick and easy to use format. Out of all the bells and whistles that he described, what stood out most for me was that both teachers and students can create materials specifically suited for them and then publish and use it on the ipod. Keeping this in mind and then creating language exchange with students from other countries, you could have some very high-tech learing going on. It isn't hard to do. This idea is especially interesting to me. Having taught in both the US and Japan, I have often looked for ways to create language exchange between those two worlds. Ipod seems to be at least one solution.