Imagine being able to listen to or view lectures and lessons on demand? Podcasts can deliver educational content for listening or viewing on your computer and iPod, freeing learning from constraints of the classroom and its clock.

A podcast is audio or visual content that is automatically delivered over a network via free subscription. Once subscribed to, podcasts can be regularly distributed over the Internet or within your school’s network and accessed with an iPod, laptop or desktop computer (both Macs and PCs).

Subscribe to Biology 101.

A podcast’s content can be anything conveyed by an audio or video file: a recorded lecture, a foreign language lesson, a demonstration of biology principles. Instructors can easily create a podcast of daily assignments and lectures from class, and publish it for all of their students. Students can likewise create and publish content and deliver it to their teachers or other students.

There is a wide-range of educational content being developed for and delivered by podcasting. These can be anything from curriculum-related presentations to professional development communities, where educators distribute content and best practices between members. And it’s all available to you now.

Create a podcast.

Podcasts can easily be created on your Macintosh. Using the Mac’s free integrated iLife applications, such as GarageBand, students and teachers can record, produce and publish their own podcasts. GarageBand has all the tools you need including music, jingles and even sound effects. Want to add video to your podcast? With a video camera and QuickTime Pro 7 or iMovie HD you can create video for your podcast and drop it easily into GarageBand.

Share it with the world.

When you finish recording your podcast, it’s time to get it on the Internet with GarageBand and iWeb. From GarageBand, send your podcast to iWeb, where you can create a new podcast series or add to an existing series. Then click Publish to get your podcast on the Web. It’s that easy. iWeb also lets you submit your podcast to the iTunes Store where the world can see and hear it.

Institutions can support podcasting across their campuses through the Apple Podcasting Server. Educators can publish their podcast files as an attachment to a weblog, much like attaching a file to an email message. The Apple Podcasting Server enables publishing weblogs and distributing podcasts quickly and easily.

Subscribe to knowledge.

With the click of a button, you can subscribe to podcast content in iTunes and have future podcasts delivered automatically to your iTunes Podcast playlist. You can playback podcasts on your computer, as well as download them to your iPod to take your content with you. So you can study and learn as you go.