Tip:
What better way to make good use of your time than to listen to a podcast while driving, doing the dishes or cleaning house. There are many people providing rich professional development resources online for free.
Start by putting your computer in a place where you are working and play the podcast through the speakers of your computer. I have a laptop that I bring to the kitchen so that I may listen to podcasts when cooking or washing dishes. Or download the audio file to an MP3 player (or iPod) and listen with earphones, or place the iPod into one of those new speaker-equipped docking stations. You are then free to go anywhere you want while listening.
One way to get continuing education credit for this would be to team up with others in your faculty. Each of you could purchase an iPod with professional development funds and use it to listen to the same podcasts and discuss them. This could lead to an action research project that could be given credit for continuing education. What other creative ideas can you come up with for using podcasts for professional development?
Here is a listing of good Professional Development Podcasts to get you started:
Will Richardson
(http://weblogg-ed.com/)
Will Richardson, a high school teachers and blog evangelist, has an extremely interesting blog. For those who want to listen, rather than read, each post he has a link to a machine-read podcast of the post.
The Educational Podcast Network
(http://epnweb.org/)
This is a collection of Educational Podcasts. It offers many, many podcasts organized by subject.
Bud the Teacher
(http://www.budtheteacher.com)
This is a blog with podcasts included in it. Click on a link in a blog entry to listen. Very interesting.
Connect Learning with David Warlick
(http://davidwarlick.com/connectlearning/)
David Warlick is an author, educator, programmer and conference speaker who you might have heard of. He has the advantage of meeting people all over the country and observing what is happening in many schools.
Nauset Technology News-Kathy Schrock
(http://nausetschools.org/podcasts.htm)
Kathy is an educator and a technology leader who is often featured at conferences. She interviews others (i.e. Annette Lamb) and shares many other things in this podcast.
Steve Hargadon
(http://www.stevehargadon.com/)
Steve interviews technology leaders, especially people who work with free and open source technology solutions.
Submitted by: Janice Friesen
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