Tag: podcasting

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I started a podcast in my previous school in 2005 which produced episode fairly regularly until 2008 when I moved to a development officer post in North Lanarkshire.

I found podcasting to really worthwhile, fun and motivating. It involved children in all sorts of learning and created many opportunities.

I’ve also produced a fair number of podcast over at EduTalk and play with microcasting  here.

I spent a fair bit of time in my development post trying to encourage the practise. Ironically I had more luck with video podcasting and for a while we had a Mac server running podcast producer which could server audio and video podcasts.

When I started work on Glow I was particularity keen to promote podcasting using Glow Blogs but didn’t see a lot of uptake.

Since returning to class in 2016 I’ve had podcasting in the back of my mind, we have, I think, posted the odd bit of audio to our class blog but until now now made a big deal of podcasting.

This session I decided to get it into our plans covering in particular:

By experiencing the setting up and running of a business, I can collaborate in making choices relating to the different roles and responsibilities and have evaluated its success.
SOC 2-22a

We are going to produce a multi-episode podcast and look for sponsorship to make it into a business.

There are an amazing number of opportunities in making a podcast for pupils including: writing, recording and editing, making a website, graphics production, finding sponsorship and publicity. We have already ticked of many of the skills that we audit in our learning.

I’ve also been learning a bit about GarageBand and how it has changed since the last time I used it. Exploring software with pupils is a great way for them to learn. My needs for podcasting for Edutalk were met by a wee bit of audacity and the levelator, not complex, but pupils are a bit more ambitious. I am also stepping out of my mac comfort zone and using the pupils iPads for the whole thing, or at least they are. They  are organising things in Teams (to include an isolating graphic person last week) and using the pupils iPads. GarageBand for recording, notes for writing, Teams for working together, brushes, sketches & keynote for graphics, numbers for organisation. Personally I would be using a different set of apps on a mac for these tasks. Moving to the pupils devices gives them control and puts me in an advisory role.

So far we have organised teams for different roles, made a start on a blog, graphics, scriptwriting. Our first bit of publicity has gone out and I cooped my daughter into a Skype visit to talk about her job as a tv producer (and her experience of working on a podcast).

We have started recording episode zero and I hope that will be published on the new podcast site next week. It is good to be back podcasting in class.

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Replied to [rant] I hate podcasts by Nitin Khanna (nitinkhanna.com)
Ok, listen up. Podcasts are stupid. I’ve got good reasons too, if you read on. There are two types of blog posts – ramblers (like this one) and informative. That’s generally what you’ll see on the Internet. Most personal content is a rambler type of blog post. It may be the most succinct two...

There is a lot to agree with here. I’ve been guilty of creating podcast with all your worst nightmares, skype, rambling and more.

But I love podcasts. Two main reasons, one the sound of voices is different, for me, than reading a post; two, I can listen to podcasts while driving to work. I don’t want succinct  information, I want to be able to do the equivalent of rambling for listening, picking up bits and pieces, thinking of something else, paying attention to the traffic.

I remember when I started podcasting there was a txt file going round that explained, by example, how much better plain text was. That is fine if you can look at it, not so much if you are washing the dishes:-)

Enjoyed the rant!

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Replied to https://micro.blog/claylowe/6241937 by clayloweclaylowe (micro.blog)

@claylowe I enjoyed your audio, thanks. I saw this today which I though was apt:

Podcasting has become a huge undertaking for people, with seasons and episodes, sponsors. It should be imho like leaving a voice mail to a few friends. Nice thing is today it can easily scale up to millions of friends.

from: Scripting News: Tuesday, October 29, 2019

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Bookmarked Ospac (GitHub)
Open Source Podcast Audio Chain. Contribute to sritterbusch/ospac development by creating an account on GitHub.

Beside other features, ospac includes a robust leveler, two solutions to avoid crosstalk and soft silence skipping.

Might be a replacement for The Levelator when 32 bit apps no longer work.

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As part of my summer holiday fun with WordPress I though I might create a ‘proper’ RSS feed for my microcast.

There are quite a few podcast plugins that would do the job but I though it might be interesting to try a bit of DIY.

Back when I started a class podcast at Radio Sandaig I used to create the RSS feed by hand with a text editor and a fair bit of copy and paste. Over at Edutalk we use feedburner to massage the feed for iTunes.

I used information from How to Roll Your Own Simple WordPress Podcast Plugin | CSS-Tricks to get me started with the template.

I copied the feed-rss2.php file from the wp-includes folder to my child theme folder renaming it feed-microcast.php

wp-content/themes/sempress-child/feed-microcast.php

I adjusted the query to get the posts from my microcast category. I also hard coded the title, link, image and a few other things to simplify the process a little.

I then used the template from CSS-Tricks as a guide to adding the various podcast tags to my template.

This ended up with a pretty broken feed, mostly due to my lack of care, but I fixed it up later I got it linked up.

I didn’t want to use the custom post type approach used in the article because that would involve editing all the old posts or converting them to the new type somehow.

My first idea was to create a feed template and switch to that when the RSS feed for my microcast category was called for.

After failing to get the template to switch for the standard category feed, /category/microcast/feed I ended up with a custom feed at /feed/microcast.

and I add

add_action('init', 'customRSS');
function customRSS(){
        add_feed('microcast', 'customRSSFunc');
}

function customRSSFunc(){
        get_template_part('feed', 'microcast');
}

to my functions.php file.

I then spent a bit of time using the W3C feed validation service until I fixed the feed up to valadate.

I’ve still got to get a link to the feed into the microcast category page head tag and I hope to do that as soon as I’ve gone a bit of research. For now I’ve a link in the sidebar.

Here is the template: WordPress RSS feed template for my microcast

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Hi Aaron,
Thanks, microcasting, at least in the quick and dirty fashion I am using certainly cuts down on the time needed. I am listen to more and more microcasts and less longer form one.

I wonder if you would be interested in trying a slowcast in the style Alan is trying, It’s Out! Episode 1 of The Puerto Rico Connection – CogDogBlog. I think I just invented the word slowcast, but the idea of taking time to think and respond might be attractive?

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Microcast_12.mp3

A few thought about my listening habits.

Some microcasts mentioned:

featured image screenshots of Castro edited with Workflow and Snapseed. Spot the guilty secret.