STaRT Tech Learning Community

Hello Fellow Community Members. Like many of you have shared, I too have been very encouraged and impressed with the great things occurring in your schools with technology. For my blog update, I do not have a podcast or movie this time but I thought that I would briefly document some podcasting trouble that I have run into and offer a viable solution/alternative to keep podcasting alive in your school. For examples of podcasts that I have been involved with, please visit my class and school site at: http://sd34.homeip.net/shipwell/home/

With using First Class 8.3 Client for recording podcasts, I have encountered a problem with the bandwidth at my school......it is too slow and cannot keep up with the audio recording of my students' voices. The result sounds like a CD skipping, or a bad impression of the 80s character Max Headroom. I quickly realized that there was no way to fix this problem and so I have chosen to have my students use Garage Band to record their podcasts. The podcast option on this program have built in music and vocal tracks ready to go. Students record their voices on already set vocal tracks. Once recorded, students export their file to iTunes, convert it to an mp3 and then drop that file into their Home Page folders on Abbynet. From there they can access their podcast on the Internet. The only downfall, is that I have not figured out how to make the tunes have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and download to their computers. At this stage, downloading is not a big deal as my kids are pretty excited that their voices are live on the Internet. Currently, I am recording Fractured Fairy Tales and hope to get to poetry by the end of the month.