Textcast

What do you do when you are walking, jogging, driving, or just generally commuting? If you are like most Americans, you are listening to something whether it be an iPod, the radio, a walkman, or Zune. What you listen to can vary greatly, but you probably aren’t listening to that cool web site you found or the interesting article you downloaded. At least not unless you happen to have Textcast. Textcast is a cool little program that will turn text into an audio podcast format that can be managed by iTunes and allows you to sync with your iPod or iPhone. You may think that sounds nice but so what. Well, imagine you are an 18-22 year-old with four 50 page reading assignments all to be done by tomorrow. How long would it take you to read those 200 pages? How long would it take you to listen to those 200 pages as you are doing other things like conditioning, eating dinner, working at your campus job. I’m hard pressed to say a student would grasp as much from listening to those readings as they might from actually reading and taking notes, but it gives a busy student an option to at least prepare for class discussions when they might otherwise have skipped the reading. In any event I think Textcast is worth a look.