I have a lot of travel time awaiting me this summer.  About 11 hours in plane rides, 45 hours in family road trips to visit family (I got out of 15 more hours because of a different trip I'll be on), 10 hours of driving by myself, and 12 hours of driving for a vacation with my friends.  That is a lot of travelling!  The thing is, to me it isn't that much.  Each year we drive to Illinois and back then to Georgia and back to visit family.  During that time I have to find ways to occupy myself.  My sister can read and sleep in the car without any problems, but I get carsick if I try to read and my long legs don't make it easy to get comfortable enough to sleep in the car.  So over the years, I've found something I love to do that keeps me entertained over the journey...PODCASTS!  But not just any podcasts, the best ones I have found are ones made by the awesome people at HowStuffWorks.com.  If you go to iTunes and search "howstuffworks.com" then use the filter on the left to just look at the podcasts, you can see each of the different types they have.  My favorites are the first two: "Stuff You Should Know" and "Stuff You Missed In History Class".  Some of their podcasts are just audio (which works perfectly fine in the car), but they have recently started making audio/video ones. 

Now as a teacher, I heard the question "Can we eat in the classroom?" too many times to remember over the past year.  One of our bilingual teachers was really great about having lunch in the classroom a couple times a week so they could watch videos from the History or Discovery Channel.  As a first year teacher, lunch was my downtime.  I could not see how he was able to relax enough during lunch when he had a class full of kids.  But when we took our district-mandated tests, his kids were always right up at the top with mine, often beating my kids out in math and science.  So towards the end of the year I started thinking of things I could do the next year that would allow me to keep my sanity during a lunch with 21 kids in my classroom.  Then I thought...Podcasts! 

Now just like anything else you use as an outside resource in the classroom, the audio or video podcasts from HowStuffWorks.com should be viewed or heard before being played in the classroom.  They don't really use fowl language, but some of the subjects they talk about are a little more mature than would be appropriate for my 4th graders.  But there is a wide variety of topics that you can choose from, and some of it even covered things that were covered in our curriculum!

Also, myself and some of the other teachers participating in this flight week opportunity are planning on making short video podcasts that can be shared with other educators for use in the classroom.  Since I am going to Ames Research Center on Sunday, I'm hoping to be able to make one within a week or two.  I will definitely be posting that on here as soon as possible, along with pictures of some cool things I see at Ames!