Thank You / Reflection

I want to thank all those that participated in the podcasting workshop today. Overall, I hope that everyone was able to come away with something usable, whether it be in creation of a podcast, utilization of an already existing podcast, or the tools to instruct your students in how to create and/or utilize a podcast. Thank you for all of your patience. In reflection, I think I'll bag podOmatic in the future and focus more on Audacity and some of its other components. I don't know about all of you, but towards the end there, I felt like I was speeding through. One of the comment pages indicated that having either more time or Part I and Part II sessions would be helpful. I couldn't agree more! Even if they were on the same day and people with past experience could choose to sign up for just the afternoon and those who might like the full complement could do both with a break for lunch to digest (both literally and figuratively) all that was begun in the morning. Feel free to post any comments or questions here on this site and I'll invite all the participants to join the wiki to add to the brainstorm page. Both the blog and the wiki that were created for this year's class might be used again in future years for teaching this topic. Remember - if it's already out there, there's no need to re-create the wheel. Go forth Pod People.

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Blabberize - Just for Fun!

PodOmatic Technical Difficulties - Go Figure

Well, I've been trying valiantly to create a podcast directly on PodOmatic to give an example of how easy it is to use and there are "issues." Of course... After checking the forum for similar comments I found that everyone is experiencing technical difficulties right now. I found that when I recorded and uploaded from Audacity, there was no problem at all playing the podcast, but when I recorded in PodOmatic, there was no play button or other source to listen to the content that had been recorded. So, bear with me... If this is working by Monday, we can create a podcast together, and if not...well, you get the idea. Nothing's perfect!

Audacity

Creating a file in audacity is pretty easy. There are many tricks of the trade available in this program to enhance your podcast. For example, you can add multiple tracks or sound effects. The problem comes when you need to export the file as an MP3. Not that this is an insurmountable issue, but it is a bit of a pain. The computers here in this lab already have the LAME encoder (I'm not calling it lame - that's its name!). We will go through step by step to export a file as an MP3 and upload it to either your teacher page or your PodOmatic page to practice.

Podomatic

Podomatic is easy to use! It is however, one more username and password to remember - ugh. It is a good way to introduce students to a way to host their own podcasts and play with the available tools from home. Of course, Audacity is Source Forge so it is downloadable for free and students can download it and access it from home, but I find Podomatic to be even easier to use. Let me know what you think... Check out the link to the right to access my Podomatic home page and my demo podcast for this workshop.