Podcasting
Greetings DEN Members,
This summer vacation sure has flown by! There is no better way to get back into the swing of things than by taking a few workshops. My district sent me to a hands-on Apple Professional Development Podcasting Institute. As a techie, I was thrilled to be going, for one reason above all others was that we were given the IPOD Classic/Video with an 80GB memory. This was such a perk! This workshop was well paced, we were all comfortable to ask questions and work with the information given. We used a great deal of Mac applications like garageband and iphoto. These programs were so user friendly that it put my PC to shame. However, this is nothing to hold the PC users back…the members of the class were so helpful that we all pooled our resources and shared quite a few ideas for making this just as easily adapted to that of the PC. The pc version of garage band is that of Acoustica’s MixCraft 4. Both programs allow you to create a voice recording, add pictures, music, and sound effects and animate in some ways. As part of the institute we created little movies using the Aesop’s Fables. It was really fun, and super easy! I can’t wait to create some great things for my students to use.
I would like to share some great websites that we learned about:
www.podomatic.com is a great site that allows you to publish and create your own podcasts.
www.pics4learning.com allows you to download pictures without worrying about copyrights.
www.soundsnap.com has a library full of sound effects that you can download and use again without worrying about those pesky copyright laws.
www.pbwiki.com is a wiki site that allows you to communication and discuss things with your students…a lot of the teachers in the training were already using this and LOVE it. I can’t wait to try it
As we went through this workshop I realized that I was already creating Podcasts with my students we just weren’t publishing them to a wiki. So I decided to take some of the projects created by my students last year and turn them into podcasts. I published them to iTunes. I was limited at one point because it was not in an iTunes format…rest assured, someone offered a great alternative. The site www.ZAMZAR.com is a free convertion website. I simply uploaded my project to this site, identified the file extension I wanted to convert it to (IPOD) and in a few minutes, I was emailed a link to download the new version! It was fabulous!
I hope you have an opportunity to take a course like this! It was so much fun and so eyeopening to the things you can do!
