A creative, tech-savvy music teacher at my school gave her students the assignment to create a podcast about gamelan music, since that is what they have been studying. She sent a letter home to the families explaining the project and the due date.
To her delight, a few days later, the first podcast came in and it was far better than she had expected. We figured out how to easily attach it to her web site and waited for the rest to arrive.
Now that they are pouring in, we are needing to overcome some technical difficulties. Here are a few things we discovered.
- iTunes, or at least our flavor of it, wasn’t liking the disks that came in in audio CD format. I assume they had been burned on a program such as Nero. Fortunately, we discovered that Real Player not only plays them, but by tweaking a preference, it will save them as mp3 files. This nicely compressed format was easy to upload to the website.
- Audacity is a great tool for podcasting, but its files aren’t portable. Saving Audacity projects generates both a .aup file and a separate data file. We have a student who keeps bringing in the .aup file. Since he doesn’t have the LAME encoder plugin for Audacity at home, we are trying to get him to use Audacity’s export command to turn it into a .WAV file. From what we read online, that should make the file portable.
- Internet Explorer 7 doesn’t have a very good upload engine; files move better with Firefox.
- mp4 files play with in Real Player. For some reason, the podcast that arrived in this format plays fine on the teacher’s computer, but when we attach it to the web page, the link isn’t playable in the browser and when you try to right-click it to download it, you get a page not found error. We are trying to use www.zamzar.com to convert it to mp3.
No word yet from the teacher as to whether or not Zamzar did the trick. It is a handy website that lets you upload a media file or enter a URL (think YouTube video), select a format you want, and then enter your email address. The site converts the file to the selected format and then sends you a download link.
This is one of many ways you can download YouTube videos. I haven’t tried it in it’s latest version. Our system engineers tell me it works well, but slowly. It took 3 hours to capture a 4o MB YouTube video, but it worked.
Anyone else assigning podcasts as homework for elementary students? How did it go? How did most students record them? What format were they saved in?
I’ll post the URL when the teacher is ready for visitors.
My students have been podcasting for a while. I prefer to not have these kind of issues so I have them do the prep for the podcast at home and all of the tech work at school.
Podcasts can be tricky when you have students using different tools. What methods did your music teacher use use when she initially gave her instruction? I have found great success sticking with .mov format if the podcast is an video podcast or M4a for audio. I also use Zamzar a lot but there are some tools like Quicktime Pro that will allow you to convert many file types as well. Because there are so many proprietary formats out there, there are no simple answers, unfortunately. Personally, I like my end result, regardless of platform, to play in iTunes. So, I strive for a file type that iTunes will support. Good luck to you. You’ve got a great blog here. ~Lee
LAME is a free download at Sourceforge, so that might be another option?
I also like the idea of using gcast or gabcast because then the students can record straight onto the web.
(Or using digital recorders like the Olympus if those are available).
I also recently saw someone had used Zoho as a way of recording a podcast–hadn’t thought of using it that way. Wish I could find the link now, but I think maybe it was mentioned by Christopher Harris on SLJ’s site.
Susan,
I had the chance to work on podcasts with a small group of teachers yesterday. We used Audacity and Photostory 3 to make a variety of audio clips and then used Zamzar to convert the files into a variety of formats. It does take some time to convert but teachers were able to create files that fit their publishing methods.
We began editing a page with podcasting resources that they found useful / perhaps you can find a tidbit or two as well!
http://www.socialstudiescentral.com/?q=node/73
Good luck!
glennw
Hi Susan,
Our elementary students at my last school used Audacity to create their podcasts and enjoyed the results. Here is a link to the section of our toolkit on podcasting and a link to the tutorial on Audacity. The third link is to the Audacity page which gives links to the “lame” files depending on your OS. Definitely get the file on your computers and don’t waste time with other software to convert to MP3s. It takes about 5 minutes of step by step instruction to have the students download the lame file.
http://dragonnet.hkis.edu.hk/up/toolkit/soft/podcasts.htm
http://dragonnet.hkis.edu.hk/up/toolkit/tutorials/audacity.htm
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3