Podcast – How to Design This Educational Companion?

The term “podcasting” is an offshoot of “iPod” and “Broadcasting”, typically an audio-visual presentation which could be viewed and downloaded. The evolutionary definition of “podcasting” encompasses audio broadcasting (audioblogging), video podcasts (vidcasts) and photo podcasts (photocasts).

Podcasting and Learning

Podcasting is emerging as an inevitable tool to record the lectures delivered by a tutor and also to record, edit and share the views of the students among themselves. Even, the students could make it as a high-tech tool to prove their knowledge in a particular topic. Nowadays, the podcasts are prepared by the students in the form of newscasts to share the news about their learning, achievements, etc. across a particular community or in a website. Besides, the guest speech in conferences given by the experts could be recorded which aids the students to keep themselves updated lively and immediately.

Capture It and Check-over

If you are planning to record an audio, the quality of recording in the particular arena has to be checked before you actually instigate the recording process. Besides, there are other technical requirements to accomplish perfection before content distribution:

• Quality of the file type (e.g. MP3 files have relatively low quality)
• Size of the file (e.g. wav files consume more space than MP3 files)
• Format of the file (the file format must support universal access)

Record, Tune and Publish

The Apple’s apparatus: You could make use of iPod, iPhone or iPad which are the best recording devices that enable free voice recording, editing (through GarageBand or Audacity) and direct publishing from the mobile device. Besides, all these apparatuses are very handy.

Vocaroo: This is a quick podcasting alternative to perform live recordings directly on the website and in the future, the file can be downloaded for the purpose of editing.

SoundCloud: The classical feature of this website is that it is enabled with social-commenting. You could directly record on the website and also it supports iPhone for transferring the created podcasts into website.

Google Voice: This is an absolute freebie offered by the Google. The voice account activation requires a unique phone number and the former offers an email-like inbox to store the voice file in the MP3 format. Editing through cutting and mixing the voice file can be done with the support of an audio editor such as Garageband or Audacity.

VoiceThread: This is an excellent platform to create a digital storytelling podcast. It portrays a movie-maker software as it is crafted with audio, picture and audio commenting options.