When listening to the “Medieval Crime & Punishment” podcast, most of the kids couldn’t hear a thing! This was not helped by the noise of their classmates (no, I do not run a perfectly ordered class). Perhaps if I had enough mp3 players so they could all listen at once this problem would be solved.
I think the main cause was that when creating the podcast, I used my super-dooper USB headset, which gives great sound, but does not imitate the $2 earphones the students were using, often sharing them with a classmate.
The positive out of all of this was that the students were really keen to get onto the mp3 players, and so worked really hard on all the other work.
iHistory Podcast Project 