Podcasting Revisited

I will be working with some of my fellow faculty members next week as we consider the uses of podcasting in education. In preparation for that, I've been looking again at the world of audio recording. Some thoughts:

• WavePad is still my favorite free recording program. It's flexible, allows one to save in many formats, including MP3 or 4, and is reasonably intuitive.
• Springdoo takes all the work out of recording...except, of course, determining the content. Since Springdoo itself retains the recording, it cannot be downloaded. That's a real drawback in this age of portable MP3 players. Students, many of them, will expect to put sound files on their players and will NOT be pleased if they cannot do that.
• Remember to look at the March 19, 2006 post here in Musings for information about sites with free music downloads.
• I am posting a few links here to school-related podcasts. They are all live as of the date of this posting, but school materials are often deleted at the end of term. I hope that doesn't happen, but...

1. AP World History - a history teacher uses podcasting to assist his AP class
2. Round Robin Story - a group of 7th graders collaborate on this story
3. Camera Position - this is much fancier than most teachers can handle time-wise, but I love it.
4. Instrumental Music at Exton - a music teacher posts samples of classical (so far) music
5. The Udall Times Podcast - a middle school "news" report
6. ColeyCast - a 5th grade using podcasting across their curricula
7. French For Beginners - complete with .pdf handouts for each lesson; a semi-professional site, but full of ideas
8. Insta Spanish - a lot like the French site, without handouts; I'm not sure this is for beginners.
9. English as a Second Language - this site has a collection of ESL podcasts; while many of these are for adults, they have much to offer in the area of ideas if not content.
10. Learn a Song This is another ESL site, and a ton of fun! We might not be able to replicate such a site, but maybe we could USE it?
11. A few more student made podcasts are on my February 7 Musings entry. There is also a link there to the How-to handout.

I have posted a how-to and some links and demos on the West Irondequoit technology pages. We have a long way to go in developing the educational potential of technologies like podcasting, so getting started seems like a good thing to do!