How to Create a Podcast or Vodcast Part 3 of 3

Hello,
Today is the last blog post for our series on How to Create a Podcast or a Vodcast. I will be talking about the following steps.

5. Turning your Podcast into a Vodcast

6. Publishing and Promoting

Let’s get started with step 5.

5. Turning your Podcast into a Vodcast: You should have your own recording of your students in Audacity. Now let’s go over adding music to your podcast. Background music is an important part of most podcasts. When you add music it give it a professional sound. One of the biggest challenges in selecting music is to make sure you follow copyright laws. When you publish your podcast/vodcast to the internet it will be heard or seen by many people. To learn more about fair use guidelines for education please visit: Guidelines for Fair Use. To add music for your intro and outro, you go to Project -> Import Audio See the picture below.

Once you find your audio on your computer, you will need to click on the open button at the bottom to bring it into Audacity. This will bring the clip into Audacity on a neew audio track. Now, this is a good point to talk about copyright issues. You are suppose to only use the first 30 seconds of a song or 10 percent, which ever comes first. You can also write the writer of the song and ask for permission to use it. Once you bring your audio in you can edit it, cut it up and take the 30 seconds or less that you want to use for your intro or outro. When you have added your background music you will want to save your completed file by going to File -> Save Project This will create a special Audacity file format that you can come back and edit later on. See the picture below.

You can also find songs for use in your podcast on http://www.podsafeaudio.com/ or http://www.garageband.com/

You can also find royalty free music to use on the following sites below:
http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/
http://www.musicbakery.com/
http://www.freeplaymusic.com/

If your school has an Apple computer the program Garage Band is included with the Mac and allows you to create your own music. Window users can purchase the program Mixcraft 5 from Acoustica for around $75 http://acoustica.com/mixcraft/

When you have all your audio files you want you can add different effects to your audios. Simply click and drag the mouse over the audio portion you wish to edit and click on Effect. You will want to play around with all these special effects. There even is a Darth Vader voice effect from the movie Star Wars. I believe it is the Change Pitch Effect. See the picture below.Now you are ready to compress all your audio files to create one single track and create an Mp3. By using an Mp3 format it will produce a high quality file in a very small size. This is where you will use the LAME file that we downloaded in an earlier blog post. To compress your wav file into a MP3 follow these simple steps: File -> Export As MP3 and name the file and save to your computer. It's probably a good idea to save the files to your desktop. See the picture below.

Now, you are ready to create the Vodcast. A vodcast is a video form of a podcast. To create your podcast using windows you can use Windows Movie Maker or PhotoStory 3. Both programs are free and most people do not know that Windows Movie Maker is already on their computer. You can download PhotStory 3 by visiting PhotoStory 3

To learn how to use Windows Movie Maker please visit my Sunday, November 29, 2009 post on Making Professional Movies with Digital Pictures/Videos for Free! To learn how to use PhotoStory 3 email me and I will send you a free tutorial document.

Once you have saved your final movie in Movie Maker or PhotoStory 3, you need to convert your files from a Windows Media Video to a MP4 by using Jodix. Simply visit http://ipod-video-converter.org/ and follow the instructions on the site. You can also download free software, like Format Factory that will allow you to convert it to numerous formats. Basically, you want to stay with the MP4 format so others can subscribe to it in Itunes.

6. Publishing and Promoting: To publish your finished podcast and vodcasts you will need to have a RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication). A podcast and vodcast can be played directly from a website. Of course they need to be downloaded to an aggregator like Itunes and Feedburner so that someone with an IPod or Zen download the content to a player to use.

You will need 2 separate files to publish to a website, which includes audio or video files. A special written language called XML language must be posted. This document contains all the important RSS information that allows your podcast/vodcast to work.

If you wish to use podcasting on your own domain, you will have to create this document for yourself. The document consists of an introductory portion and a list of items. Of course you can also use free and paid services that will help build the RSS, but to make it work well with Itunes, special tags should be included. You can also use other hosting sites that are free and paid like http://www.teachertube.com/ , http://www.youtube.com/ , http://www.metacafe.com/ If you use these sites you want to remember to not have any pictures of your students in the video. You never want to post videos of your students online.

To promote your web site you want to use tags, or labels so google can find you. Tags and labels are key words that help people that are searching for content to find you. For example, if you look at the end of this post you will see the tags that I have used in this blog post. You also want to share your podcast or vodcast with people that are interested in your content. You will find that it takes time, and consistent posting to get noticed in the search engines and to draw traffic to your site. You can start a blog about your podcasts or vodcasts. You can also leave positive comments on other people's blogs, podcasts and vodcasts. Hope these tips help you out, as you start to create your own podcast or vodcast with your children.

Next week, you will hear and see a video that went viral on March 1, 2010 and as of March 6, 2010 it has received almost 5,000,000 visits. That's right almost 5 MILLION hits. Can you believe it? 6 days later a video gets those types of visits. Coming soon in April, I will be blogging about how to use the Flip Digital camera software and how to edit your videos to get them ready to post online. Also in 2 weeks you will be hearing about the importance of backing up your portable hard drives and how expensive it can be to recover data. See you soon.

How to Create a Podcast or Vodcast Part 2 of 3

Hello,
Today I will be covering the following steps:

3. Installing Audio Software to Record Your Podcast
4. Using Audio Software to Record Your Podcast

So, let's get started with installing the audio software.

3. Installing Audio Software to Record Your Podcast: You want to use the best possible free software to edit and prepare your podcast. The one I recommend is Audacity. It's free and a very good sound editor. It can be found by clicking on the picture above. Once you go to the site you want to download Audacity 1.2.6 Once you get to the site you will want to choose Audacity 1.2.6 installer and if the download does not begin, choose the option direct link Save the file to your desktop. When you are using the software in Audacity you will need to convert your sound files to an Mp3 and you will need to download the LAME encoder by going to LAME Mp3 Encoder Once you visit the site, you will need to choose the operating system you are using, then click on the LAME download page Toward the bottom of the page you will see the following picture. Click on the appropriate link on the site, and save it to your desktop. Next, you will go to your desktop and double click on the icon and it will ask you to run it, click run and follow the instructions. You will want to remember where you saved it, usually it will be in your Program files menu. Next, double click on the audacity icon on your desktop and you will see the following:

Open Audacity and click on Edit -> Preferences -> File Formats Now this is what you will see. Click on Find Library and follow the instructions. (Here is where you want to find the LAME Mp3 Encoder file, remember it is under Program Files)

4. Using Audio Software to Record Your Podcast: Once you have your software and the Lame Mp3 encoder is installed you are ready to test your microphone. You can either use a headset with a microphone or you can use a microphone and your computer speakers. Plug in your microphone or headset. The microphone is usually the red jack and the headphones is usually the black jack. Go to Start -> Control Panel and double click on Sounds and Audio Devices. Next, click on the Voice tab and click the Test Hardware button. Follow the instructions to test your microphone. For additional tips on settings to make your recordings great visit the following site Great Tips on Recording When you are in Audacity make sure "Microphone" is selected as the recording source in the drop-down menu on the mixer toolbar.

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> On the Audio I/O tab make sure your sound card is selected as the device for playback and recording. In the Channels drop-down box under Recording, choose 1 (Mono). You can use stereo if you want but it will make your file larger and you want to try and keep it as small as possible. Under the Quality tab make sure you choose 44,100Hz as the Default Sample Rate and 16-bit as the Default Sample Format. Under the File Formats tab make sure you choose WAV (Microsoft 16 bit PCM) as the Uncompressed Export Format.

Now you are ready to record. Check on the microphone Meter toolbar in Audacity and you should see a red level indicator moving when you start recording. You can talk into the microphone and make adjustments to the volume until it looks like the picture below.

Now, your almost ready to record. Down below in the picture you will see the featured buttons to start your recording.



Simply push the Record button and you can start talking. When your done recording press the yellow square button to Stop the recording. If you want to edit your file, where you want to cut out parts of your recording or delete parts. You simply edit out parts by clicking and dragging to highlight the part you want to remove. Select Edit and choose either Cut or Delete. The part you want to edit will turn a grey shaded color. If you want to keep only one section of a recording, highlight that section and select Trim from the Edit menu. Take a look at the picture down below and you will see how to edit your clip.

You can also record many multiple tracks to add to your podcast, which is one of the many features you can't do with movie maker 2.Ok, next week I will be talking abou the final steps in your podcast, step 5. Turning your Podcast into a Vodcast and step 6. Publishing and Promoting. I will also be covering how to add music to your podcast and how to convert your WAV file to an MP3 so you can post online. See you next week.

How to Create a Podcast or Vodcast Part 1 of 3

Greetings,

Today I am blogging about podcasting and vodcasting. According to wikiipedia, podcasting is defined as a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication. It is a series of digital audio files, usually MP3 that can be downloaded on a regular basis automatically. It's kind of like having your own radio station and you are the broadcaster. Vodcasting or Videocasting is defined as online delivery of video, or using still digital pictures in a video. There are four steps to creating a podcast: plan, produce, publish, and promote. The detailed steps into creating a podcast include the following stages:

1. Planning

2. Gathering Ideas

3. Installing Audio Software to Record Your Podcast

4. Using Audio Software to Record Your Podcast

5. Turning your Podcast into a Vodcast

6. Publishing and Promoting

This blog will break down these steps in a 3 - 4 week blog episode. In this blog episode I will be discussing the first 2 steps. 1. Planning and 2. Gathering Ideas

1. Planning: When you start to create a podcast you need to plan what you are going to say by scripting your words. You might want to have an introduction and a welcome. After you have your script then you can practice recording it. You want it to sound like a radio broadcast or a radio show. When you start a podcast it is important that you continue to create new and regular episodes for your listeners. If you are planning on your students to create podcasts, then you need to monitor the planning process to make sure students are well prepared before recording their podcast.

If you are going to create a podcast or vodcast, and put your students' voices in the project and upload them to the internet, then you are going to need a podcast/vodcast permission slip for their parents to sign. You also want to include a brief detail of what a podcast is, (this will educate the parent) and how only the voices will be used. Now, back to planning your podcast: Here are a few questions you want to ask yourself while you are planning your podcast. What do you want to communicate to your listeners? What do you want your students to communicate in their podcast? How often do you want your students to create a podcast? What do you want to teach your listeners? What type of action do you want your listeners to take during the podcast?

2. Ideas: What topic or idea do you want to share with your listeners? You want to create a 3 -5 minute podcast for your listeners maybe once a week or once every 2 weeks. You want your listeners to always want more from your future podcasts. Here are some additional web sites of sample podcasts:

Elementary Schools:
http://www.kid-cast.com/
Willowdale Elementary School
Wells Elementary School
Jamestown Elementary

Middle Schools:
Harrington Middle School
Mabry Middle School
Twin Valley Middle School

High Schools:
Amphitheater High School
Coral Gables High School
Briggs High School

Educational Podcast Directory You can also go to Itunes and search for student podcasts. You can also go to google and search for podcasts as well. Here is a Podcast Legal Guide you may want to review to make sure you follow all the legal guidelines in podcasting http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide

Here are 25 more ideas that you may want to think about for your podcast or vodcast:
1. Visit http://www.pppst.com/ – This site has thousands of teaching PowerPoints that can be used for Podcasting
2. Talking books
3. Having students read a book
4. Vocabulary lessons
5. Oral tests
6. Test Reviews
7. Spelling lists
8. Pledge Allegiance
9. Numbers and Alphabet songs
10. Recording lectures
11. Introduction to staff
12. Faculty meetings
13. Communications to parents and community
14. Homebound lessons
15. Announcements
16. Lecture notes
17. How to:
a. Check out books in the library
b. How to use the Grade book program
c. Validate grades
d. Fill out forms
e. Do a certain project
18. Book reviews
19. Field trips
20. Student forms
21. Staff Development
22. Dictation
23. Student information
24. Registration information
25. Senior information

Hope these ideas help you out, as you plan your podcast. Next week, I will cover step 3. Installing Audio Software to Record Your Podcast and step 4. Using Audio Software to Record Your Podcast. See you next week.

How to Copy and Paste

Hello,

Today I will be video blogging about how to copy and paste information from the internet into a Microsoft Word document. This will also work when you are copying and pasting information from another document into another document. A few weeks ago I was teaching elementary students how to copy and paste and they loved it. Simply push play on the player below and you can follow the instructions. Don't forget in a few weeks I will be blogging about podcasting and vodcasting. I will also be filming more helpful video clips to post online. Hope this helps. See you next week.