At the Scottish CILT Outreach day in Dunfermline I mentioned podcasts. These are online radio shows that you can listen to on your computer or on the move with an MP3 player.

Well, RTL, the French broadcaster, are creating some of these podcasts of their programmes. Where school networks slow down under the stress of your regular online radio show, these podcasts can be downloaded at home, for example, and brought in on CD or with an MP3 player.

The shows they are podcasting are fairly heavy duty, but might provide some listening matter for your Advanced Higher (and good Higher) pupils.

None of the BBC’s fluffy “trial period” here. This is a full blown podcasting service that will help us provide some authentic listening to really good pupils in any year.

Up until now a Modern Languages teacher would have to go through a long process to capture internet radio from abroad to play and repeat it at leisure for a class: Be there when the programme starts, ready to record with Audio Hijack, which then takes up an inordinate amount of disk space at it records the ‘live’ tinny radio sound. After that, to save your poor disk from collapsing under the pressure, you would have to drag the aiff file into Garageband or Audacity and convert it into a low-disk-space MP3 file and… hey presto!

Now just subscribe or download the podcast.

One method takes six times as many words to describe as the other. I’ll leave you to decide.

Quoi regarder, alors? So what’s on offer? To be honest, it’s pretty heavy going but could be useful for some Advanced Higher pupils:

L’invité de Jean Michel Aphatie, du lundi au vendredi à 7h50. You can subscribe to each show from the MFLE Blog by right clicking the link (or ctrl-Click on a Mac), copying the link and putting that into iTunes.

Le fait politique d’Alain Duhamel, du lundi au vendredi à 7h47 (Advanced Higher?)

On refait le match, chaque lundi à 20h00 (Good for the boys that one)

A partir du 29 août :

Le Journal économique de Jean-Yves Hollinger, du lundi au vendredi à 7h15

That last one might make good bedtime listening.

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