Posts Tagged ‘podcast’

Here is a handy tool for anyone interested in finding a podcast about a specific topic.  Everyzing is a service that scans through an assortment of podcasts and converts all that speech into text that is searchable.  You can search for generic topics like “educational technology” or broad topics like “politics.”   Search results can be sorted by date or relevance.  By clicking on a hit, you can listen to the audio in the built-in player.

A link to your specific search term is also available so you can jump right to the part of the podcast talking about your topic.  In this way, you can quickly hear a phrase in the context it was recorded.

The site also searches online video clips and other multimedia.  The goal is to make all digital content searchable.  Imagine being able to find a video clip of someone giving a speech by searching for a few key terms from the speech.  You wouldn’t even have to know the speaker’s name.

EveryZing also sells a product that will convert multimedia content to printed pages.  This has potential for hearing impaired students.

I can even find someone I know in a podcast.  Here’s John… fifty times.

I managed to squeeze in an extra podcast this week.  Teachers Teaching Teachers #95 dives into filtering first hand with the people that run the filters in an assortment of districts.  The panelists ranged from a New York City department of education system engineer to a tech administrator from Alaska.

The federal government requires filtering in any district that receives E-Rate funding.  Even though the federal government’s contribution to the bottom line of the local district is somewhat small compared to state and local funds, most schools comply with federal filtering requirements.

Specifically, districts must have several policies in place.

These include: measures to block or filter pictures that (a) are obscene, (b) contain child pornography, or (c) when computers with Internet access are used by minors, harmful to minors. (CIPA)

At every conference I attend where vendors of filtering software are on the show floor, I always ask the same question.  “Do you guarantee your filtering solution will block 100% of those items required by CIPA.”  So far not a single filtering vendor has been willing to guarantee anything like that.  The Internet grows too fast to make this claim.

Filtering by definition cannot be perfect, but the government still requires it.

This podcast quickly gets beyond the CIPA mandates and into how filtering at the district level really works.  I was glad to hear about one aspect of filtering that most teachers and students don’t think about: bandwidth.  Many schools block streaming media because the district doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle it.  In these cases, blocking streaming media has little to do with the content of that media.

The most important point in this podcast was that teachers need to find out how the filtering rules are modified in a district.  All of the panelists said that most requests to unblock sites are granted, but a teacher has to know how to make her voice heard.

Rappold has posted the first episode of The Web Edtech Podcast.  The topic is Learning Management Systems.  You should recognize a couple of the people participating.

Last week at the eTech Ohio Conference, I attended John Schinker’s presentation.  He had told me ahead of time that he would be talking about the online community of edtech people that has boosted his overall quality of “edtech life” in the last year.

I found out he has become quite involved with EdTechTalk and is one of the hosts of the EdTechTalkWeekly podcast.  John said I should join for the live chat on Sunday nights at 7pm.  I did that tonight.  It was very worthwhile.   I was able to listen to the live podcast and watch the chat complete with URLs.  The speed round of URLs has something for everyone.  Tonight there was even an interesting guest speaker.

I plan to join them next week.

Recording a podcast is only half of the process.  Yesterday I talked about creating an MP3 file, but once you have that file, you need to get it to someone interested in hearing it.  If you have your own server, you can upload your MP3 file and make it available just as you would any HTML file.  If you don’t have a web server, there are many free options available.  Here are a few:

http://www.mypodcast.com
http://www.ourmedia.org
http://www.podcastspot.com
http://www.twango.com/welcome/podcast.aspx
http://www.podstrike.com
http://www.podango.com
http://www.podbean.com

Keep in mind that a 20 minute podcast will produce a file that is almost 10 MB in size.  You will need to store this file on a server and provide the bandwidth for listeners to download it.

Most listers will also “subscribe” to your podcast with an aggregator.  This means you will need to create an RSS feed for your podcast.  If your podcast service doesn’t come with an RSS creation tool, I recommend Feedburner. 

1 - Create your content.
2 - Upload your MP3 file.
3 - Publish your feed.