Week 9, Thing #21, Podcasts

Finding and listening to interesting pod casts is easy; most of them have RSS feeds so you can subscribe to them and have the information come to you on your iGoogle page or blog. I toured Yahoo, Odeo, PodcastNet, and PodNova. On the EdTech site I found a beginner’s lesson in Morse Code and a great educational pod cast site, www.edtech101.com, where I listened to a pod cast on scanning. They recommended a web site, www.photorepairshop.com, which has a “scanning calculator” to calculate the proper resolution to scan any particular file so that you don’t overload your Smart Board, for example, with an image that is too dense. But publishing your own pod cast takes a few more steps. I added the edtech101 pod cast to my iGoogle home page, which I will be able to access from school (until IMS catches onto this possibility). I also read the entire How to Pod cast tutorial pod cast tutorial – this requires a pretty sophisticated set-up. You must have a web domain, a web host (to store your audio files, which will take a lot of bandwidth), a blog where your listeners can contact you, make comments, read your notes on your episodes, view photos, etc., and RSS feed. The tutorial recommended not using a blog site, since the URL will be hard to remember, but apparently Blogger and Libsyn will allow people to register a web site for about $10 a year. A web host with good technical support is a must, and you need at least one gigabyte of storage, and at least 24GB of transfer bandwidth a month to get started with an audience of about 300 people. The tutorial recommended using Feedburner as the web host, Blogger as the blog site to accompany the pod cast, and OurMedia to store the broadcasts. For the “hobbyist” pod caster, the tutorial recommends Lybsyn. For the serious pod caster, the tutorial recommends Wordpress for the blog service and RSS Feed and Powweb or Globat for web storage. As far as pod casts go, for now I will definitely be a consumer, not a producer, of pod casts, but there are some great sources out there for educators, and again, people collaborating to share knowledge and ideas.