Blogs and Podcasting
21 07 2006
I have spent the last couple of days leading cpd on the use of blogs and podcasting. My audience consisted of West Midlands ICT Consultants and members of the ICT team in Shropshire. All delegates set up an ethinkblog, links to these can be found on my sidebar in the ‘Consultants Blogs’ link category.
The morning of the session was used to introduce the wordpress blog and its functionality to the delegates, I will get around to putting some notes together to explain exactly what we did over the Summer break.
After lunch (see photos) which was at the local Abbey, we returned to a hot ICT room to continue the training.
To start the afternoon off we looked at Flickr and Del.icio.us, both technologies were well received and delegates set up accounts for future use. My flickr page can be accessed here and my del.icio.us page here, with my network here(that contains links to the other consultants del.icio.us accounts).
The rest of the afternoon was set aside to producing enhanced podcasts using Garageband on the ibooks, I am still looking for an equivalent piece of software for producing enhanced podcasts on the pc. I have found Podcaster by Kudlian Software - that appears to work on the pc but there doesn’t appear to be a pc download!
The podcasts can be heard on the various delegates blogs, here is an example. After publishing their podcasts we looked at subscribing to the podcasts with iTunes, and also investigated finding podcasts on iTunes. To complete the circle I demonstrated the use of Bloglines and Newsgator as examples of RSS aggregators.
Everyone agreed that there is great potential for these technologies in the classroom, both for teacher and student use. Hopefully we will try and produce a sample teaching unit or two that are based around these technologies. If anyone is interested in assisting with their production then leave a comment below and I will get in touch. I would also be keen to hear what the delegates thought about their days experience and what they plan to do next.
Hi Steve
Just a quick thank you for the CPD sessions on Wednesday. This has contributed well to discussions we are having here on Web 2. Interestingly I have been told that what I was doing on your afternoon sessions wasn’t podcasting but downloading media files (because there was no RSS feed involved). This may be technically true, but I think if students are going through the process of creating mp3/m4a files, using software that uses the term ‘podcasting’ (as Garageband does) and students are downloading the files and listening to them (especially on a remote device) then that sounds like podcasting to me. What are your views?
Regards
Michael, as soon as your file is uploaded to, or linked to from, your blog then the file is enclosed by the RSS feed. That then allows people to subscribe to the feed, which would include the podcast.
As Steve suggests, the RSS enclosures that make the recorded file into a feed is automatically generated by Wordpress. Wordpress hasn’t always done this but it’s been the case since about March. I discussed it on my own blog here.
This was one of the main considerations when I started podcasting - how was I to generate the enclosures without having to encode them myself (tedious for me to do, inconvenient and downright difficult for young learners using ethink)? Before Wordpress included the facility in their code I used to use feedburner to generate the podcast enclosures; it’s not hard to do (and Feedburner provides a LOAD of other neat facilities) but was just another operation to go through that was abstracted too far from the blog posting for young learners to take on board.
As it happens, then, the MP3 file you created IS a podcast - I just put it into my podcatcher and it aggregated just fine.
Steve,
Thanks for the w2.0 work on wed. I’ve been looking @ flickr & trying to geotag. How did you do it & link to google?