Day 24–Listening to Podcasts with SlapDash and Xbox Music on a Windows 8 Tablet

A Windows 8 Tablet for Teaching and Learning - Day 24

Friday, December 28, 2012                     

One of the activities that I try to make time for every day is listening to one of the many podcasts I subscribe to. What is a podcast? Think of it as a radio show that you can download and listen to at your convenience. There are podcasts available on almost any topic you can imagine and there are many created by fellow educators. I tend to favor audio podcasts as I can listen to them during my commute to and from work. It took me a while to find a Windows 8 podcast client but I recently found the SlapDash podcast app in the Windows 8 Store that meets my needs. It comes in a free version supported by advertising or a paid $1.99 app that eliminates the ads.

What I like about the SlapDash app is that I can subscribe to podcasts manually as most are not listed in the Slapdash Catalog. Many of the podcasts I listen to are from “grass roots” producers by educators all around the world. Many of these producers have never gone to the trouble of submitting their podcast to directories like SlapDash, Zune, or iTunes. If you cannot find a particular podcast listed in a store catalog then you will need to subscribe to it manually using the RSS feed for the podcast.

Cindy Rich and I do a bi-monthly podcast called TechTalk4Teachers. We have added TechTalk4Teachers to the iTunes and Zune catalogs so you should be able to do a search and subscribe from there if you use one of those services. 

If you do not you can still add our podcast manually by adding the following RSS feed to subscribe:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtalk4teachers

The SlapDash app provides an attractive display of our past episodes and I have included a screenshot of the TechTalk4Teachers feed below:

The other discovery I made is that the Xbox Music app also plays audio and video podcasts that you have stored locally on the tablet. Since a podcast is nothing more than a MP3 file with special tags the new Xbox Music app will play any non-DRM MP3 file. There is a secret in that you need to store the files in subfolders on the hard drive under the Music folder. This discovery makes it very easy for me to copy my vast catalog of podcasts to the Music folder and have all podcasts copied there available in Xbox Music on my Windows 8 tablet.

By the way Xbox music is a fantastic app and now provides 10 hours of streaming music for free each month. There is also a music pass that costs $9.99 per month for unlimited streaming from a music catalog of millions of songs. The Xbox music service provides a very attractive user interface and plays photos of your favorite artist/band on the screen as you listen to the music. It really looks great connected to a large screen HDTV while playing your music. Of course, this being Windows 8, you also have your choice of other services like Pandora or Spotify if you prefer those services.

Keep on Learning,
Dr. Grissom

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

http://eiu.edu/itc/