Encyclopedia of Life

A very interesting website described as: "an online evolving library of all life on the planet," the Encyclopedia of Life is a source of podcasts and articles useful for many types of listening, reading and discussion activities.

Link: http://eol.org

The podcasts are about 5 minutes long, so they're very practical to use in the classroom or to assign for homework. The narrator is easy to understand, speaking very clearly and at a balanced tempo. In addition, each podcast has a downloadable script in pdf-format.

Very useful for teachers are the educational materials in each section. The EOL Podcast Guide for Educators includes "an overview of the podcast and features of each episode and links to relevant educational materials."

There are also interviews ("Meet the scientist") of the people involved in each of the topic areas.

An example I used was the segment with an interview of Edward O. Wilson, in which he talks about how he became interested in ants. My robotic engineering students found this interesting because we had looked at material about how "robotic swarms" were inspired by the swarm behavior of ants. My biomedical engineering students were interested in segments focusing on scientists in their field. This material led to a discussion of how scientists and engineers become interested in their field, and this, in turn, inspired students to talk about how and when they became interested in their own field of engineering.

Podcast with E.O. Wilson: http://education.eol.org/podcast/eo-wilson
Podcast script: http:education.eol.org/sites/default/files/EOWilson.pdf