What is a Podcast?
The word "podcasting" is portmanteau combining the words "broadcasting" and "iPod"
In case that you don't keep up with popular technology an iPod is a portable music player produced by Apple Computers.
The most popular format of podcast is MP3.
An MP3 is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount of data (10:1 compression is common) required to represent audio, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original.
What is podcasting and What is not?
Technically speaking and according to Wikipedia, podcasting "is the distribution of audio or videos files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the Internet, using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening or mobile devices and personal computers"
Listening to audio is nothing new to Internet. Audios files available for downloading, streaming radio,audio blogging and other ways of listening on the Web have been around for some time.
What puts podcasting apart from other ways of delivering audio online, such as streaming, is the idea of automatically downloaded content. What makes this possible is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) .
Check out Will Richardson's RSS Quick Start Guide for Educators http://www.weblogg-ed.com/rss_for_ed/ for further details of this technology. Just as RSS transformed blogging, enabling people to manage vast quantities of text content, so a revision of RSS for podcasting has made it easier for people to now leave their homes with pieces of the Internet crammed into the mp3 players.
Of course, to really take advantages of podcasting, you need high speed Internet connection. If you have access to this, you can plug in your mp3 before you go to sleep at night, and in the morning is full of fresh audio content. What allows you to do this is a piece of software usually called " a podcast receiver" such as Juice, The cross-platform application that is free to download from: http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php.
Once you have this, here are the stages you go through:
1. Click on the subscriptions tab in Juice and then the "+" sign that enable you "add and feed".
2. Click on the RSS feed button of a podcast you want to subscribe to.
3. A simple copy and paste the address (URL) or the RSS feed will subscribe you to the podcast.
4. You'll now see the podcast episode details load in the lower window of Juice.
5. Whenever the podcast is updated, and so long as you are running Juice, this program will automatically download the new episodes to a directory you specify.
Creating and Publishing Student Podcasts the easy way
The easiest way to create a podcast with students is to use one of the free automatic podcast creation sites such as Odeo <http://www.odeo.com> or Podomatic <http://www.podomatic.com>.
Here are the stages you need to follow to be able to create a podcast at one of these sites:
Next, check the confirmation email and click on the link. This will take you to your new podcasting homepage.
From here you only need to click on one or two buttons (Record audio at Odeo, and Post Episode at Podomatic) to record straight from your browser.
Afterwards, your audio is automatically published as a podcast.
These sites really take the hard work of podcasting, and mean you do not bother with finding server space, setting up a blog or establishing an RSS feed. Without a doubt. It is the quickest and best way to start, and means you can concentrate on the content of your podcast rather than technical aspects.
These way of producing a podcast is all very well if you have access to computer lab where you can where the students can record and post their own content.
If your resources are limited and you want to record learners in classroom, edit the audio and then publish it later, do not despair, as you can still use the previously mentioned sites. Here's how you do it:
First, record your students in class. Use a digital voice recorder or a portable mp3 player that can record your students.
Remove the unwanted sections and reorder the audio if necessary with audio editing software such as the free-to-download, easy to use Audacity <http://audacity.sourceforge.net>.
Safe the file as an mp3 on your computer .
Upload the mp3 file to Odeo or Podomatic.
There is a limit to the storage space on these free sites, and although you can upgrade to a paid account (or create more than one) , there are other ways of publishing podcasts.
References:
Audio of Internet Comes of Age. Graham Stanley (March, 2006 )
Retrieved from
http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume9/ej36/ej36int/
Digital Natives, digital immigrants Prensky, M (2001)
Retrieved from
http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Blogging and RSS: the "What is? and How to?" Richardson, W. (2004, January, February)
Blogging and RSS: the "What is? and How to?" Richardson, W. (2004, January, February)
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