Wired for Sound
I’ve been a little disorganized in terms of listening to Podcasts. From time to time, I’ve downloaded podcasts, listened to them and given some of the better ones to my senior students as source material for discussion and further investigation. The idea with podcasting however, is that you subscribe to the podcasting sources of your choice and let the software on your computer automatically download the latest podcasts from those sources as they become available. I was using a program called Juice to organize my podcasts but I was half-hearted about it and lost interest completely when the program failed to work under Vista. There was supposedly an easy fix for the problem but it didn’t work for me.
I’ve now rekindled my interest in the subject via iTunes. Not having an iPod, I’ve tended to ignore iTunes but recently I became aware that it could be used to freely subscribe to podcasting sites and download podcasts. So I downloaded the program, all 49Mb of it, and installed it on my laptop. I searched for some suitable sites in the iTunes Podcasting Directory and decided on Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American. Once you subscribe, the latest podcast is automatically downloaded and so I was away and running. You can also see a list of earlier podcasts and can download any of those as well if you choose. I also subscribed to Mandarin Lessons with Serge Melnyk, got the latest download and then promptly unsubscribed. The reason for this was that I just wanted an example to show the Mandarin teacher at school. I should do the same for Spanish, given that this language is taught as well. It seems to me that the straight audio podcast is ideally suited to language learners but I’ll need to convince the language teachers at the school if there is to be any widespread use of podcasting in that faculty.
My goal is to get teachers and students at the school to make use of this technology. As with the adoption of all Web 2.0 tools, the first step is purely passive: listening. Get some teachers, preferably heads of faculties, to listen to some podcasts. The next step is to get teachers thinking about how to make use of podcasts in their teaching. Given that students are wired for sound nowadays, there should be no problem getting them to listen once they are directed to the podcasting site or the audio file that has been downloaded is made available on the school Intranet or website. However, if the use of podcasts is to be an ongoing part of a teacher’s toolkit, it is important to subscribe and I think the iTunes approach is the easiest at the moment.
The final step is to get teachers to create their own podcasts. This is not as difficult as it might at first seem. The first step is to create an audio file. This is easily accomplished using Microsoft’s OneNote which all teachers should have installed on their laptops. A basic microphone and headset is all that’s needed hardware-wise and after hitting the record audio button, what’s created in a wma or Windows Media Audio file whose quality can be adjusted from low quality monoaural to high quality stereo. Sound clips could be recorded on mobile phones as well of course but an annoying feature of the Nokia phones is that you can only record sound for 60 seconds. There is software you can buy that extends the recording time indefinitely but it costs about US$20. The useful feature of the mobile phone is that it is more portable than the average laptop and this could sometimes be an advantage.
After creating the audio file, the next challenge is to “broadcast” it to a waiting world. If a school has an Intranet or online course software like Moodle, a teacher can simply put the audio file there and direct students and other teachers to its location. An alternative is to use a site like www.vudyo.com that allows for the upload and sharing of audio files. The resultant file is not really a podcast, strictly speaking, because it can’t be subscribed to. The ideal is to make the podcast available on iTunes, something that I’ve just succeeded in doing.
It involved these steps:
- I created a new blog in Blooger (called voo-doo-guru.blogspot.com)
- I converted my wma file to an m4a file using iTunes. Unfortunately, the sampling rate that was applied was 64kbps, whereas my original wma file had been sampled at 20kbps. This meant the file size tripled from about 1Mb to over 3Mb. The conversion parameters can probably be adjusted but I’ll look into that later.
- I uploaded this m4a file to some free space that I had available on Geocities.
- I created a hyperlink in my blog to this file’s location because the audio file can’t be uploaded directly to the blog.
- I used FeedBurner to create a special URL that can be used by iTunes
FeedBurner, recently acquired by Google, will take the atom feed from Blogger and convert it into a podcast friendly feed that is acceptable to iTunes. You need to establish an account with FeedBurner to do this but it’s quick and easy and doesn’t cost anything. So now, if anybody wants to subscribe to the podcasts that I create on my podcasting site, then all that person needs to do is to enter the URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/NBZz. I’m quite pleased to have succeeded in doing this because iTunes is so well known and it’s cool to be able to say listen to my latest podcast on iTunes. Of course, my initial effort was a rather rambling account of the process described above but I’m sure that with practice, I’ll get it sounding a lot better.
I’ve actually created “inhouse” podcasts with my senior students using the free, open source program Audacity. That enables you to combine various audio tracks together, so that you can have for example some background music playing while you’re speaking. This can add “atmosphere” to a recording and the students quite enjoyed experimenting and adding their own music. Audacity will be the program that I’ll use to create my podcasts. All I need to do now is to decide on a theme. Exciting.
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