-A pre-recorded audio program that's posted to a website and is made available for download so people can listen to them on personal computers or mobile devices. - Entrepreneur.com

History:

-Term is derived from "iPod" (from Apple), and term "broadcast" meaning the act of receiving information and leisure content on the radio/television.  The two words emerged and a "Podcast" was born

Creators:

-Adam Curry, former MTV Video Jockey (pioneer of podcasting)

-Dave Winer, RSS feed developer ( a group of Web feed formats used to publish content such as podcasts; makes it able for people to stay informed with websites in an automated manner that can be drawn into special programs)

-Starting at the grassroots level through the "Daily Source Code" podcast (consists of everyday life, events, news)

-worked at ipodder.com (website including the access to DL Podcasts and more)

- many other developers From there, many of these developers improved the code and produced their own iPodders. When people discovered that they could create and host their own radio shows, a community of pioneer podcasters was born.

By 2003, web radio had already existed for a decade, digital audio players had been on the market for several years, and bloggers and broadcasters frequently published MP3 audio online. More recently, the RSS file format was being widely used for summarizing or syndicating content. While RSS/RDF already supported media resources implicitly, applications rarely took advantage of this development. In 2001, users Adam Curry and Tristan Louis, aided by UserLand founder and RSS evangelist Dave Winer, added support for a specific enclosure element to Userland's non-RDF branch of RSS, and then to its Radio Userland feed-generator and aggregator.

In June 2003, Stephen Downes demonstrated aggregation and syndication of audio files using RSS in his Ed Radio application. Ed Radio scanned RSS feeds for MP3 files, collected them into a single feed, and made the result available as SMIL or WebJay audio feeds.

In September 2003, Winer created an RSS-with-enclosures feed for his Harvard Berkman Center colleague Christopher Lydon, a former newspaper and television journalist and NPR radio talk show host. For several months Lydon had been linking full-length MP3 interviews to his Berkman weblog, which focused on blogging and coverage of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaigns. Having Lydon's interviews as RSS enclosures helped inspire Adam Curry's pre-iPodder script and related experiments, leading to a variety of open source iPodder developments. Indeed, blogs would become an important factor in the popularization of podcasting even before many professional radio broadcasters and entrepreneurs with business plans adopted the form.

Benefits:

 Teachers

      - Guestspeakers are made available through podcasts instead of in person due to the difficulty of scheduling.

      - Storytelling is made easier by allowing them to multitask.

      - Replace powerpoint presentations.

      - Can keep parents posted with podcasts on online newsletters.

Students

     - Can replay lectures for later review. Can also pause and rewind making note-taking easier.

     - Can create podcasts in group projects.

     - Are able to carry out their education beyond just a classroom.

     - Can turn an iPod into an educational tool.

Disadvantages:

    - Not everyone has a computer at home.

    - Not designed for audience participation.

    - Not as high of quality as a professional video or radio broadcast.

4 Steps to Creating a Podcast:

Plan- What do you want? Make a script!

Record- Have fun and be creative!

Publish- Make sure its in a downloadable MP3 format.

Promote- Tell people about it!

Helpful Links:

Video on creating a Podcast on Garage Band.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#garageband-podcast-51.html

Creating a Podcast in a classroom:

http://learninginhand.com/podcasting/create.html

Creating a Podcast on Windows QuickTime

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/podcasting_win.html

 Podcasts:

 http://www.epnweb.org/