I notice you mentioned podcasting in your post.  What do you use?  We use garageband and iMovie to do most of ours.  Podcasting is a really neat way to get the students working.  I could see doing repetative stuff for special needs kids being useful.  Also it could be a great assessment tool.  If you gave your students an activity to do they could record themselves answering some of your questions to assess for comprehension.  Using podcast you truly have a ton of different ways you could use them.  It sounds like it would be a great way to interact with your students.  

Katrice Thomas