May 19 2008
Podcasting questions
Mark from Thunder Bay had a couple of questions about starting up a podcast:
How expensive are the voice recorders?
We’ve found decent/reliable voice recorders for under $100. Look here for more information about what we use or hope to use in the future. They kind of look like cellphones and uploading audio files to your computer works the same way as a digital camera.
How do you evaluate students?
We view podcasting as an extension of our Lanaguage Arts program. Look here for more information about assessment.
How much of each day is devoted to the podcast?
We’ve experimented with a variety of models for this. At the moment we have reserve one hour for podcasting every Friday. Also, whenever students have free time they often choose to work on their podcasts.
How many computers do you use?
Our classes each have a networked Windows XP computer. We also have access to a media cart that we wheel into our rooms. Our students visit our school’s computer lab (30 XP computers) once a week for an hour, but apart from a unit on using Audacity at the start of the year, we usually don’t use lab time time for podcasting.
A few weeks ago we received an Asus eeePC. It’s less that half the size of a regular laptop but appears to be ideal for our students to use it for editing audio and word processing. We plan to write about those machines in the near future.
Jane and I also spend time on our home computers for final editing.
How about software?
Audio-editing sofware: The main piece of software we use is Audacity. If you are on a Mac, we hear that GarageBand works exceptionally well.
What else will you need?
- online storage space: We store our audio files on our school website. Another option is to use storage space that comes free with Edublogs.org. They offer 100MB which works out to be roughly an hour and half of MP3 audio.
- a blog: This makes it easy to let people know everytime you have a new episode. We’ve had success using Edublogs.org, a free service offered to educators.
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
Could you please update your link to the equipment list (i.e. voice recorders)? It doesn’t seem to be working. Thanks.
Mark
[Reply]
I’ve fixed the links. Thanks for pointing this out.
Nathan
[Reply]