By: Sheri German

Trinity University teamed up with Teach for America to provide a Masters in Education program for some of its teachers in Washington, D.C. Throughout the month of June, I taught 28 young, eager teachers—mostly of special education students—how to better utilize technology in the classroom. Special for their idealism and desire to give of themselves, these teachers are part of a program that resolves to remove inequity in our education system. On its own web site, the Teach for America mission is described this way:

Teach For America is the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in ensuring educational equity and excellence for all children. Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort.

Our class took place at McKinley Technology High School, an urban school just off North Capitol Street. Working in a Mac lab full of lovely G5 iMacs, we tackled my usual Teacher Technology syllabus: WebQuests (with of course, Web Standards and 508 accessibility features!), Kidspirations, software evaluations, teacher blogs, and iMovie videos.

When the students set up their free teacher blog/web sites at edublogs.org, they were very excited by the possibilities, but expressed concern over the fact that many of their students had only rudimentary reading skills. They wanted to augment the blogs with another way to communicate with their students. Hence we embarked upon podcasting, a kind of syndicated audio blog that listeners can subscribe to and download to their computers or MP3 players.

See Joel Martinez's Podcasting 101 article to learn more about the fundamentals of podcasting.

Subscribe to Podcasts

First I wanted to let my students experience some podcasts, particularly educational podcasts like "French for Beginners," a podcast I subscribe to so that my son can practice his French during the summer. Subscribing to a podcast lets iTunes (or other "podcatchers") automatically download new episodes at time intervals you designate in the podcast category of the iTunes preferences.

It is easy to find and subscribe to podcasts if you have a free copy of iTunes, which has versions for both Mac and Windows users:

1. Launch iTunes
2. Choose the Music Store category on the left
3. In the Choose Genre popup menu on the left, choose Podcast
4. In the Categories column on the left, choose Education from the menu.
5. Select a grade level, or, like I did, Language Courses.
6. Choose a podcast such as Beginning French.
7. Click the name of a podcast to begin listening to it.
8. You can also click the “Subscribe” button to automatically get new episodes.

   
   Image 1: Go to the Apple Music Store and choose the podcast genre to search and subscribe to free podcasts in various categories

   Tip: If you do not have or want iTunes, you can download iPodder, a cross-platform podcast receiver.

Podcast Directories

In addition to the iTunes music store, there are many podcast directories out there, such as podcast.net and podcastalley.com that you can browse to find podcasts on every conceivable topic.

So now you have a podcast address that you obtained from a site you frequent, or one that you found at a podcast directory. Once you have an address, you can subscribe by using this iTunes menu: Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast

Image 2: Use the Advanced menu to subscribe to podcasts for which you have an address

Image 3: Enter the podcast address, click OK, and that's it! You're subscribed

Preparing to Podcast

Now that the students had experienced and subscribed to podcasts, it was time to prepare them to create their own. I introduced them to the essential ingredients and process.

The Podcast Ingredients

Every good cook assembles the ingredients before beginning to mix and stir, and podcasters are no different. Here are the files we will need in order to publish our first podcast:

• The audio file in MP3 format
• An RSS feed that includes an enclosure tag

Here is the free software we can use to create the files:

• Audacity, free recording and sound editing software that comes in versions for Mac, Windows, Linux, and other operating systems
• The LAME plugin for Audacity that converts the sound file to the MP3 format

You'll also need a microphone in order to record the sound file. You can get as elaborate in your choice as you like, but I just used an inexpensive headset that I bought for my PC a few years back.

Finally, you will need something to help you generate the RSS feed. You can use dedicated software such as Feeder for Mac OSX or ListGarden for Mac, Windows and Linux, but I just used the template Joel Martinez provided in his CMX podcasting article.

Tip: Of course you can always use professional software like Adobe Audition to record your podcast. Fortunately for us, one of the students in the class, David vander Velden, worked at McKinley High School and was the broadcast teacher. He had access to the school's recording studio, which was complete with recording booths and Adobe Audition software. Armed with their scripts that I asked them to write over the weekend, the students all took turns in the several recording booths that David helped them to use. You can listen to the MP3 for a particularly wonderful podcast written by one of the students, Kate McMahon, about why she "teaches for America."

Scripting the Podcast

Before you record your podcast, it's a good idea to write an outline and script. Many podcasts include the following sequence:

• Intro music
• Introduction
• Topic(s)
• Contact info
• Summary/goodbye
• Outro music

Keep this in mind as you record: you'll use about a megabyte for every 2 minutes of talk or 1 minute of music. Most podcasts run no longer than 15-30 minutes.

Warning: You should beware of copyright issues when using music in your podcast. Make your own with software like GarageBand, or purchase it at sites like Free Play Music. You can also look for podcast music at gcast.

Record the Podcast

Install Audacity, and take note of the directory to which you copy the LAME plugin (I put mine in the Documents folder on my Mac.)

1. Launch Audacity
2. Open the preferences and set them up to use a quality of 44100 Hz and File Formats of AIFF 16 bit for Mac and WAV 16 bit for PC.
3. File > Save Project As. (This creates a file with an AUP extension.)
4. Click the red record button (a circle icon).
5. Speak into your microphone.
6. Click the Stop button when you are done (the square button).
7. Name your audio track in the Audio Track popup menu (choose Name).
8. You can click the Play button if you want to hear your recording.

   
   Image 4: It is easy to record a podcast with Audacity

9. You can delete a track by clicking the x to the left of the track name.
10. Under the Project menu you'll find commands that allow you to add new tracks and mix them into one.

    
    Image 5: The Project menu gives you many options for adding and mixing tracks

11. You can perform quite sophisticated editing tasks with Audacity. To view tutorials on using its many features, you view this Audacity tutorial list. You can also read Audio Editing for the Masses (a commercial Community MX article) by Joel Martinez. He goes into more detail about using Audacity to create high quality sound files.
12. Once you are happy with your sound file, choose File > Export as MP3.
13. Navigate to where you want to save the file and click Save.
14. You will get a dialog box asking you to point to the location of the LAME plugin.

    
    Image 6: You will need to navigate to the location where you stored your LAME plugin

    
    Image 7: The LameLib plugin location

15. Fill out LAME's Edit ID3 Tags dialog box. ID3 tags attach information about the podcast to the sound file. When you listen to the podcast in iTunes or another podcatcher, this information will display as the podcast plays.

    
    Image 8: Add data to your sound file

Add the RSS Feed

Now that you have recorded your audio, all you need to do is create the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. RSS feeds are just a variety of XML (Extensible Markup Language). Podcasting RSS feeds include one special tag called the enclosure tag that points to the location of the MP3 on the server.

If I were to put up a podcast at my site, I might edit Joel's template this way.

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Sheri German's Podcast</title>
<link>http://www.swanilda.com</link>
<description>A podcast for my teacher tech students.</description>
<language>en-us</language>

<pubDate>Wed, 12 July 2006 23:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 13 July 2006 16:21:12 GMT</lastBuildDate>
<managingEditor>sheri@communitymx.com</managingEditor>
<webMaster>sheri@communitymx.com</webMaster>

<item>
<title>The Teacher Tech Podcast Part 1 </title>
<link>http://www.swanilda.com/mypodcastname.mp3</link>
<description>This podcast introduces my students to podcasting.</description>
<enclosure url="http://www.swanilda.com/mypodcastname.mp3"
length="22100" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<category>Podcasting Part One</category>
<guid>http://www.swanilda.com/mypodcastname.mp3</guid>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

For each new episode I want to add to my podcast, I copy everything from the opening item tag to the closing item tag and paste under the first item pair. I then edit the duplicate item to add the new episode information. I then save the document as mypodcast.xml.

Upload and Subscribe

Now all that's left to do is upload the RSS feed and MP3 file to your hosting space. Go to the RSS feed address on your server, which will be something like feed://www.mysite.com/mypodcast.xml. Copy this address and use your favorite podcatcher to subscribe to your own feed. You can upload your episodes to your computer or your iPod/MP3 player.

Free Podcast Creation and Hosting Services

This all works fine if you have your own web site, but what if, like most of my teachers, you have no personal hosting space, or are using something like edublogs that doesn't allow you to upload an xml file? You can still publish podcasts by using a free podcasting service. Two popular services are as follows:

• http://studio.odeo.com/create/home (Odeo)
• http://www.gcast.com/ (GCast)

Most of my teachers used Odeo, so let's look at that one. Go to the URL listed above and sign in to create a new, free account. After you log in, Odeo gives you many options for creating the MP3 file:

• Create new audio with the Odeo Web recorder
• Upload MP3s that you have already created from software such as Audacity or Audition
• Import audio that you have already published on the web
• Record by phone with the Odeo phone service (which may be a long distance phone call)

  
  Image 9: After logging in, Odeo gives you recording options and utilities to set up a podcast

Odeo then lets you publish your sound file, turn it into a podcast, add it to the Odeo Directory, and select a player or button that points to your Odeo-hosted podcast to let you add it to a web page such as one on edublogs.

Conclusion

I hope this article has inspired you to start using podcasts in the classroom. The applications are as varied as the teachers who create them. My students created podcasts on topics such as good homework environments, phonics, communications for parents, lists for summer reading, behavior modification in the classroom, creating a class newspaper, and how to enjoy poetry.

If you want to learn more about podcasts, such as how to get the best audio files, there is a good book published by Friends of Ed called Podcast Solutions: The Complete Guide to Podcasting (ISBN 1-59059-554-8).

Happy podcasting!

Approximate download size: 231k

Keywords
podcasting, education, special ed, xml, rss, audio, mp3, Audacity, LAME, iTunes, iPodder, RSS feeds, enclosure tag, ID3 tags, audio editing