T4 - Jordan School District

Social Software:  Podcasts and Podcasting-Vidcasts

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Podcasts and Podcasting/Vidcasts
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Social Software in the Classroom–PD Class

The term podcast is a hybrid of the words iPod and broadcast. It refers to an audio file that can be downloaded and played on the computer, or burned to a CD or transferred to a portable audio device.

This type of audio has been around since the rise of the web nearly twenty years ago. People created audio files and linked them to websites where you could click on the link and listen or download the audio. There is really nothing different about podcasts. Why have they become to popular in the past year then?

The answer again is rss. When the rss 2.0 standard was introduced it included the ability to attach files to the feed. This meant that you could attach any type of file to your feed. It so happened that the file type that became the rage was audio and podcasting was born.

What has made podcasting so popular is that people can now listen to things of interest to them when they want. Instead of listening to sports talk or news talk radio, they can listen to podcasts about education, educational technology, knitting, science fiction, or whatever else they are interested in.