I was amazed at the number of podcasts and topics that there were while we were researching them.  I was very surprised since it seems that I have been using the internet my entire life and had never heard of or heard a podcast before.  I found podcasts on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.  After I was done checking out all the nerdy stuff that interests me, I began to look at other podcasts that could be used in an educational setting, and not just purely for entertainment.  I found a really good webs site that was labeled 10 Educational History Podcasts to subscribe and listen to.  I’m a really big history buff.  If I would not have proceeded to becoming an English major I would have become a History major.  I started going through a few of them and I found the podcasts very entertaining and I actually learned a few things that I had never known before about the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great, and the Crusades.  I was trying to think how these history podcasts could be useful in an English classroom setting and I think I found one.  Whenever you’re about to begin a new set of works in your classroom which were written during the same time period, they could be used to allow your students to get a cultural understanding of what was going on at the time.  While I did not find any, I’m sure there are podcasts out there about Victorian England, the Industrial revolution, Civil war, Civil rights movements, etc.  I think this would be much better than having your students read the dry introduction at the beginning of the books which many a time I have found myself forced to do so.