Why you don’t have to miss the ICT in Education articles even if you’re too busy to read them

If you’re too busy to read the articles on the ICT in Education website, you can listen to them instead.

Thanks to a neat little widget from Odiogo, each article has a “Listen Now” button at the top of it. Click that, and you will be able to listen to the article read out to you. Warning: there’s a bit of  delay between my posting an article and the Listen Now button working, so if you try it straight away and it doesn’t work, try again a few minutes later.

Too busy to read? Listen instead!Clicking the button is fine for the odd occasion, but what if you want to hear the articles on a regular basis, and don’t want to miss any either?

The good news here is that you can subscribe to the articles as a podcast. Look at the left-hand sidebar of the website, and click on “Subscribe to the articles podcast”. You’ll be taken to a special Odiogo web page where you can select from a number of subscription options, such as iTunes.

A slightly disconcerting aspect of this approach is that the podcast is listed under the title “Articles”.

So is the quality of the reading any good? Well, if you don’t mind a robotic-sounding voice and a few mispronunciations, it does the job. From my point of view as a blogger, all it cost me was the initial set-up time, which was not very much. From a reader’s point of view, it means that not only people who are too busy to read, but also those who are too sight-impaired to be able to, don’t have to miss out. In fact, on that last aspect, it helps me as a blogger to make the website more accessible.

As it happens, the listening option has been on the website for a long time, but I haven’t drawn attention to it for a long time either.

There is a limitation, which is that it seems that only the most recent ten articles are listenable to. Given that I update the blog more or less every weekday, that amounts to two working weeks.

So if you’re going on vacation, be sure to subscribe and pack your mp3 player before you leave home!

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