I'm a massive fan of using podcasts in my teaching and learning I currently study polish and I've got
various podcasts that I download and listen to on a regular basis but I also use it for
the other languages that I've studied in the past and I still try to maintain and that is
French and Spanish in this video I'm going to show you one of the easiest podcasting tools to
use if you've never done or used podcasts before then you're really going to find this interesting
Google podcast is one of the easiest tools to use it's very easy to search for material it's
very easy to download it's very easy to organize your podcasts and it's a great technology to show
to your students the great thing as well about it is that you can have it on your smartphone so
I will listen to podcasts when I'm on the train or when I'm on the plane Etc let's get started
with the video really hope you like it if you do please like the video please share the video
with other teachers and with other students of course comment on the video I'd love to know
what you think about this video and of course join me on my YouTube channel let's get started
so Google podcast is one of your apps so if you click over here and scroll down you should find
that you've got Google podcasts available to use it's one of the options there is if you can't find
it click on more from Google I'm going to click and open my Google podcasts okay and straight
away you can see that it shows you kind of my subscriptions here at the top of the screen
okay and I can just click along and it really is easy to use now first of all I just want to give
you just a little bit of a taster of why it's so useful to show to students I'm going to show you
how to subscribe to podcasts I'm going to show you how to search for podcasts I'm going to show you
how to download podcasts let's just get a quick taste let's say for example I was to click on this
one here okay and what I've actually got here is a whole series of podcasts that are very very short
they're like two or three minutes long and you it tells me which ones I've already completed and you
can see clearly here that I've been listening to quite a lot of these these are just very
short podcasts two minutes in Polish to help me with my language and if I want to listen to any
of the podcasts I can just simply click here and it will open up and play the podcast to me
okay so this is a great way of me getting access to material now if I was to just
jump back again to the home page if I click here it's going to bring me back to kind of
my home let's just go to another one I've got here a French one that I listened to
okay and I can again simply just come down listen to this one here click on the button
foreign
okay absolutely fantastic that I get access to all of this material of course it's free and
it's really easy to do if I just click back let me just sort of take you now through the
process first of all of how you would search for podcasts that you might be interested in
so how do you find podcasts and then if you find podcasts that you like how do you subscribe to
them okay so first thing then I'm just going to write at the top here English podcasts for
foreign students and I'm just going to press on enter and what it does is it gives me a
big list of all the podcasts that come with that particular search item and you'll see there are
literally hundreds I could go on and on there's going to be all sorts of podcasts now what you
can do is you can quickly click and listen to a podcast and see if you like it so if I click
here their time time with them spending time with them do you go all in at first like okay so I can
click on the podcast and listen to it I could come down to another one have a quick listen
Odes in addition to my free episodes go to teacherlook.co.uk okay so you can see that
I can basically search very quickly have a quick taste of particular podcasts that I want there's
one there called plain English for example that I can play you can see in English there's absolutely
tons of material now if you are interested in audio but you want to have audio that's
got activities around that audio rather than just a simple podcast I'm going to put a link
on the screen now that you can click on to a great video that will show you some websites
that have got exactly that we're going to move on with what we can do with Google podcasts
now what happens if you want to know more well the best thing to do first of all is to click here or
here it doesn't really matter it's going to bring you up to sort of give you not only the latest
um podcast but also some of the previous ones just because you might want to listen to a few more
now if you get convinced afterwards okay this really is a good Channel a good podcast Channel
and you really want to buy into it and subscribe to it then just click on the link at the top and
it will open up kind of the page with all the information about that particular um podcast
now from here you can do several things first of all you can visit the website and that can
be quite interesting because sometimes the website provides even additional
information like for example some of the websites and I'll show you an example in a
minute provide the actual script to the podcast but here you can also subscribe to a podcast
now why would you subscribe to a podcast well simply because that all of the subscriptions
all of the podcasts that you've subscribed to will be in your subscriptions and you can always
just click there and see the latest podcast from your favorite from the different channels that
you're subscribed to so it's worth searching for content and then subscribing to it now you can
unsubscribe at any time so if I click here then I can unsubscribe to a channel now I'm just going
to jump into my subscriptions a minute so I can go to here and that will allow my subscriptions
to open and I can see my subscriptions at the top and I'm just going to show you an example of what
I mean so if I click through here I can see that there are various podcasts that I'm uh subscribed
to I'm going to click on this one here and I'm just going to take you over to the website for
this one just to point out that sometimes on the website you'll see in the podcasts that in this
particular case which is one obviously I'm using in Polish but the same thing happens in English I
actually get the uh script of the podcast and that can be really useful now if you like websites that
have got audio but also with the transcript and there are some great ones around I'm going to put
a link on the screen now that will take you to a video that will show you some audio websites but
with transcripts because obviously the podcasts generally don't have the transcripts as well
so if I jump back to my subscriptions not only do I see a whole row of all the things
I'm subscribed to at the top of the screen but also I will see the latest recordings
here as well now there's a couple of interesting things that you can do if you kind of flick
through your recordings and you think oh I must listen to that one and oh I must listen
to that what you're doing then is you're cueing those podcasts and so if you now come over to
your queue you'll notice that they're all lined up and if you play the podcast it
will actually play the first one then it'll play the next one and then it will play the next one
Etc so you can cue the podcasts and this can be really useful for example if you say gonna go in
your car or you're walking down the road you're on a train and you want to cue up the podcast and
think right I'm going to listen to this first then this then this which is something I occasionally
do I must admit it's not a feature that I make a lot of use of now what I want to talk about
now is a couple of really interesting controls and to do this I'm going to do it in English
so let's go back to explore and what we're going to do this time is we're going to do
English for foreign students and we're going to write Elementary because we want something
at a lower level okay it's a very good idea to be very explicit about what you're looking for
because it's going to really help you to find uh the types of things we've got an American
English grammar review I'm going to click on that and let's imagine that this one here okay I can
quickly test and listen if I'm happy remember if I want to I can click here and it's going to bring
me over to the actual Channel and if I want to I can subscribe to this particular one now let's
just play an example I'm going to click here and I just want to show you a few controls that you've
got you can obviously pause one of the most useful controls and one that I use quite a lot
when working in Polish is that you can click here and you can actually slow down or speed up the
delivery now obviously if it's in English often I listen to it a bit quicker if it's going to be in
Polish and it's say for example something produced by a native then I will often slow the speed down
and you can even click on this button here and just do it manually manually so you can slow
the speed of the delivery down this can be really really useful for language learners many teachers
don't realize that you can do the same thing with the videos that you play in English or in other
languages on YouTube and if you want to learn more about how you can control videos in a very similar
way you can slow the speed down of the video you can speed it up but you can also do some
other things like limit exactly the part of the video that you want to play and even open up the
transcript of YouTube videos then there is a video on the screen now that will show you exactly that
now if you download either the Android version or the um the OS version the Mac version of this
you'll find on your telephone that the two things are synced now what do I mean by that well it me
I mean that anything that you subscribe to from the website for example or from the the app uh
in Google when you open up your uh app version of it it will be exactly the same on your smartphone
and even to the degree that it remembers where you are within a podcast so if you've got a long
podcast and you're halfway through it and you've been listening to it on your computer and then
you want to listen to it on your telephone you'll find that when you open it up it will start from
that place I love the way that the two sites sync together one final thing when you use the
um the app version in other words the version for your smartphone and I really do recommend that
you use that because of the fact that they sync together then you do also have the option of down
downloading the podcast and that is brilliant so for example if I'm going on a trip and I'm not
sure how good the internet is going to be or it might be because I'm on an airplane and I know I
haven't even got internet then I can download the podcast that I want to listen to and then I don't
need to worry about the internet now it doesn't seem to be possible from the internet version in
other words working with the app on your computer you don't seem to have that option but you do have
that option if you are working with a copy with with the app on your smartphone always remember
that if you log in on your smartphone and use the app on your smartphone make sure you use
exactly the same email address that you do when you use it on a computer that's the way that the
two sync together so really you only these are the key key buttons Explorer and when you do a
search make sure you do it really specifically you can also scroll down and see here that it kind of
recommends lots of stuff to you here you can see your subscription options remember if you don't
wanna or you're fed up with something and you don't want to subscribe to it anymore you can
just simply click on that particular channel uh on that particular podcast Channel and then you can
unsubscribe as well you can queue any recordings uh that you're planning on listening to you can
do that very easily and once you've watched the you can click here and that will take you out
of the queue which is quite useful so just to make that absolutely clear if I click here and
then if I was to refresh the page you'll see that it would disappear so Q in adds it to the
cube and then of course you can take away from the queue as well really think this is a great
uh app uh it's very very easy to use you'd also have the option here when you're working with the
controls to jump back 30 seconds or more move forward 30 seconds I've become a big fan of
Google podcasts I don't subscribe to hundreds and hundreds of them I've got particular ones that I
really like and I'm using very often really hope that was useful okay really hope that video was
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videos on the screen now that if you're a language teacher or language student you might find useful