podcasts on iTunes

I've had no prior experience with pod casts but my boyfriend is a big fan of them so I asked him to help me out on this one. He said that anyone who is anyone has their podcast on iTunes so that's where I went to search which may or may not have been a good idea. The reason it may not have been a good idea was that the searching on iTunes was not easy. When searching for “Thesis Statement” one of the first results is an explicit song with that title by the band Hot Pink Karma....I guess you learn something new every day. For another thing, there was too much over choice and very little information was provided about the contents of the individual entries. Trying to click for additional information usually resulted in the system trying to download the item so I had to mostly guess and had a few false starts before I found a semi-decent podcast. To make matters worse many of the pod casts on the site are no longer available but are not removed for some reason. Thus I would spend a lot of time finding a pod cast that looked promising only to find that I could no longer access it. What I eventually did find was a producer called Stone Writing Center which releases two pod casts called “Essay to Go” and “Grammar to Go” which are designed to provide students with concise chunks of English instruction they can listen to while moving from class to class. It seemed like a good concept and, information-wise, the content is spot on, covering exactly what students (at least freshmen which is basically the level I teach) would need to know. However, I highly doubt I would actually use them in a course because the narrator speaks in a very annoying and condescending tone and interjects comments like “Now I know this seems hard,” or “A thesis statement probably seems like the kind of think only a graduate student could get right” which I fear would make the students feel talked down to (it sure made me feel that way) which is exactly what they DON'T need in their first college level writing course. As far as what instructions I would give to students, iTunes still seems pretty easy to use. If I supplied the name of the pod cast, that should eliminate the search issue and, once the item is found, you just click and it downloads. However, iTunes DOES need to be downloaded and installed so, if I were to use it as a podcast source for my classes (which I'm not sure I would) I would include instructions on how to do these things. This would probably be too much work for the student though, unless I was going to use it more than once or twice in a course.