Podcast Evaluation

Podcast	3 Key Points that connect with my curriculum	Unique method of content delivery	Follow top 10 Best Practices?	Revisions to better fit best practices?	What would I do differently?
Astronomy Cast http://www.astronomycast.com Sound	1.  The main topic of this podcast is astronomy and that is the largest science unit that I teach to my third grade students. 2. One of the specific podcasts is about sound, and sound in space. In addition to studying astronomy, we also study the physics of sound and it is great to not only cross curricular lines, but cross different science unit lines to allow students to make connections in what they are learning. 3. This podcast explains something that students often wonder about, and this promotes curiosity and wonder.	They began with a popular saying “In space, nobody can hear you scream” and explain why it works. This immediately peaks student interest by connecting it to background information they already have. This also uses an interview with a knowledgeable scientist.	This was a well prepared interview. Definitely prepared in advance. It was about 20 minutes in length. There were clear titles and tags attached to the podcast. It was a good quality recording.	There were advertisements throughout. I understand these need to be here to an extent, but they deter me from wanting to go back. There were not many additional notes or related topics listed with the podcast.	Many of the topics are too complex for my third grade students. In this specific Sound podcast, I like a lot of the content, but I think I could only use pieces with my students. I don’t think their target audience is students the age of my class.
Children’s Fun Story time www.itunes.com Alice in Wonderland	1. In Daily 5, a language arts class structure, students need to listen to reading daily. This is a great way for them to listen. 2. Exposing children to great literature is essential to building a love of reading in them. This gives students access to audio books. 3. Alice in Wonderland is a book that is available for free. It is required in my curriculum for me to read this story with my students. I also like that students can download this at home for free and follow along as well.	The person reading aloud does different voices for each character, which demonstrated great fluency. The podcast is available on iTunes and is easy to find and use.	It is well prepared in advance (follows a script.) Each chapter is short (the entire book is quite long.) The recording is of good quality. Was not sales-y.	There were no notes or outside resources regarding the content of the books. It might be good to include where to find the print versions of the books, or websites that relate to the book being read aloud.	I would use these stories in the same manner that they were created, but also include stories specific to what I teach and books that I read with my students. I would also like to see non-fiction texts on this podcast series.
Poem of the Day www.itunes.com Monster	1. Exposing students to many different types of poetry. 2. Allowing students to listen to fluent reading (like for Daily 5) where each poem is read by a different person.  3. Poetry is a genre of writing that I teach. We could even record podcasts of poems that students write themselves.	Each poem is it’s own short podcast. That makes locating them easy and listening to one a day very doable in the classroom.	This podcast was well prepared. The audio recording was of good quality. There were no sales pitches besides for the website that created the podcasts. All podcasts were short in length.	There were no outside resources available for the poems. I would like to see links to websites and further information on the poems and the poets.	Since all the poems are read by different people, some are not read as fluently as others. I might use that to compare and contrast and discuss what makes reading fluent. I also would include many different types of poems, and more poems aimed at third graders.