Dan Russell, whose book and other work I’ve referenced dozens of times on this blog, recently published a good lesson on how to find audio files. His post is not a lists of places to find audio files (I have a list of those here). Dan’s blog post teaches readers how to locate specific sounds and podcasts.

There are three parts to the lesson and each one is useful on its own.

How to locate podcasts about a particular topic across multiple podcast platforms.
How to search within the transcript of an audio recording. That part introduced me to a couple of new tools including this one for analyzing audio and video.
How to search for specific audio sounds like the bells of Notre Dame.

Applications for Education

As more and more podcasts, and useful ones at that, are published they are going to become a good source of information for students to use as part of larger research projects. Knowing how to locate podcasts about a specific topic is going to become an important skill. Furthermore, being able to create transcripts and search within transcripts is a skill that will be important to students who create their own podcasts and videos.