Tag: podcasting

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Radio Edutalk has been up and running for a week or so now. We had our first attempt at a live skype last Wednesday (archive). This was not hitch free as I messed up the settings making my audio echo, David on the other end of the Skype call and an iTunes track or two seemed fine. I think I know how to fix it.

The listener numbers have ben low with 45 unique listeners. We peeked at 6 at once. This is fine, it might build up a wee bit over time. As I mentioned in the previous radio post, it is not about numbers. The low numbers will also make it easier to keep the radio turning over 24 hours a day. The current plan is:

  1. A general random rotation of over 100 files from the EDUtalk archive most of the time.
  2. An hour of themed audio from 7:30 – 8:30 most nights (programmed by myself at the moment).
  3. A live hour at 8:00-9:00 on Wednesdays from David and myself, hopefully with some phone ins & scheduled guests.
  4. I’d also be interested in “DJing” some of the audio in some sort of theme as an alternative to the autoDJ and in the longer term we would be interested in others having a go. We are also open to adding to our pile of audio files, so if you or someone you know has some interesting audio please get in touch. I guess we could also add any suitable licensed material…

Hopefully you might find something of interest if you dip in to the stream in, perhaps as you do some marking or prep.

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Radio edutalk

Edutalk has now been running for over 2 years, we have published over 300 pieces of educational audio. These vary from TeachMeet recording, through to personal reflection by way of pupil podcasts. Hopefully theses provide interesting and educational listens.

One of the things that David and I talked about when we started EDUtalk was issuing a CD rom of recordings, this would perhaps have helped to keep older, still valuable, audio playing.

One of my thoughts about podcasts is that older episodes get forgotten about in a way that old blogs posts, through searching, do not.

REcently I’ve been reading about and listening to ds106 Radio and Stephen’s Downes’ Ed Radio. These are Internet radio stations. My interest was also stimulated by my daughter who is currently doing some pro bono work for Airing Pain « Pain Concern a podcast and internet radio.

I’ve alway believed (and gone on about) one of the benefits of podcasting over radio is its asynchronously. The potential audience for internet radio would seem to be less. A few things have made me think again:

A comment on Stephen Downes – Google+ about ED Radio:

That's the intent of Ed Radio, it's not something you really focus on, it's more background where you listen while you work & where something may or may not catch your attention.

Somewhere else, Stephen wrote about the interesting challenge of broadcasting to no listeners. Can’t find the quote at the moment.

on broadcasting to radio #ds106 | D’Arcy Norman dot net

How does the ability to instantly broadcast live audio to a group of people impact what we do? How does this instant synchronous connection effect the sense of social presence? And how does having to make the decision of streaming vs. recording effect the experience of sharing?

I’ve also been impressed by the quality of internet radio when streaming to a phone on g3 as well as wifi. So we though we would give this a go

How to

There are various posts on the how to set up a station but I basically went to Internet Radio Servers and set up an Icecast server on pay as you go. I then followed CogDog Guide to Nicecasting – CogDogBlog to test Nicecast. You can use Nicecast to broadcast from iTunes or a mix of iTunes and voice or even iTunes, voice and Skype. You can use Nicecast for an hour at a time for free and pay when you have tested it. I am using it on test mode at the moment. I have also tested the AutoDJ set up, where the station just streams from a set of mp3 you have uploaded via ftp. this seems to works well. Instructions on Internet Radio Servers are straightforward.

I’ve briefly tested Papaya Broadcaster a £2.99 iPhone & iPad app this seem to do the trick. allowing you to broadcast on the move.

A Plan

The costs at the moment £5 a month to host the AutoDJ files and £5 per 10GB broadcast. I am figuring with only a few listeners it will only be £10 a month to broadcast for an hour or so each night, using a variety of sources.

We have a few loose ideas of what to broadcast:

  • Broadcasting sets of audio from the Edutalk Archive on AutoDJ 7:30 to 8:30 each night. The hope is that folk will have it on in the background listening for serendipitous educational audio. I’ve not really worked out the queuing of the audio but will select some and mix then up every day or two. So far I’ve downloaded and converted to the correct samplerate & bitrate over 60 files.
  • Once a week on Wednesdays David and I will attempt some sort of skpye in show where folk can skype in for a chat, we still have to test this. This can be recorded and fed back into Edutalk as a podcast.
  • Curated sets from the Archive, using nicecast and iTunes, possibly opening it up to guest hosts.
  • Live event broadcasts, for example from a TeachMeet using Papaya Broadcaster.
  • Anything else we can dream up or is suggested…

Tech Tips (for geeky teachers)

It seems that you need to use files that all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels. I’ve started off with 60-70 files downloaded from Edutalk , the problem is these do not all have the same sample rate, bitrate and number of channels This can be dome by opening and exporting the files from Audacity, or exporting them from iTunes. This could take quite a while. A quick google found a script for the Lame lib (That is used by Audacity to export mp3s), You need to instal Lame so that it is available for command line use, this sort of stuff can be daunting but worth it as a time saver.

What I did was open the Terminal, navigate to the folder full of mp3s (on a mac you can type cd and then drag a folder onto the terminal window), then you just put this int othe terminal window and hit return:

mkdir save && for f in *.mp3; do lame -m m -b 128 –resample 44.1 "$f" ./save/"${f%.mp3}.mp3"; done

What that does is make a new folder save inside the mp3 folder, then use lame to convert all the mp3s in the folder into new files in the save folder that all have a bitrate of 128, a sample rate of 44.12 and are mono files. Well worth doing if only to avoid having to see asave dialog 60 times.

How to listen

between 7:30 and 8:30 head over to Radio Edutalk – EDUtalk. A flash player should start when the page opens. There are also buttons to listen with winamp, Windows Media player, Real player or QuickTime. Hit the title song to open in iTunes.

I’d love to hear what folk think, ideas for broadcasts or cc licensed audio that could be played.

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Two years ago David Noble and myself started a open to all podcasting project: SLFtalk, “a project to gather the voices of educators attending the Scottish Learning Festival 2009“.

The idea was to hear from a range of folk attending SLF 2009, gathering their experiences and opinions. It was, in my opinion a success.

Shortly after SLF09 we took the idea forward with EDUtalk – Audio publishing by educators, using mobile devices 1 and over the last two years and we have had 332 audio files posted on EDUtalk.cc.

This year it looks like LTS Education Scotlandare joining in the fun. They have a AudioBoo channel, Glow Radio and it looks like they are going to be tagging their boos so that they will be picked up by EDUtalk. AudioBoo is only one of the ways you can add your voice to EDUtalk.

There is an ongoing open invitation to anyone interested in Education to add their voice to EDUtalk.

Obviously it would be great to get some reports and thoughts about the Scottish Learning Festival or #EduScotICT from a wide a range of voices as possible.

Instructions for adding your audio to EDUtalk are on the site: How to EDUtalk and both David (@parslad) and I (@johnjohnston) are happy to help or try and answer any questions.

If you are going to SLF11 please pick up your phone and EDUtalk.

1. I’ve blogged about this a fair bit↩

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For the last year or so I’ve been running (supported by network support officers at every turn) a Podcast Producer server. This lets schools in North Lanarkshire publish audio and video very easily indeed.

Recently I’ve been testing the workflows that let you add, for example, and introduction or credit section automatically after the video is uploaded to the server (examples: Glow Blogs 3 Posting and Glow Blogs 2 Dashboard and Settings)

Podcast Producer does a lot of complicated stuff to do this, and uses some commandline applications in the process. One of these, pcastaction, is included in Mac OS X as well as Mac OS X Server. pcastaction can be used via the terminal to manipulate quicktime movies, it seem to be particularly useful for batch operations.

This evening, on the UK ADE mailing list, someone was asking about adding a logo image to a lot of movies. I did a couple of quick tests and found this can be done quickly with pcastaction.

Here is a quick set of instructions followed by a screencast. I am only a command line beginner but it is fairly simple stuff.

1. Create a plain text file (I use TextMate but TextEdit will do the same) containing the following: 

 #!/usr/bin/env bash

for FILE in ~/Desktop/movtest/*; do

   /usr/bin/pcastaction join --prb="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/movs/" --input1="$FILE" --input2="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/example.jpg" --output="$FILE".mov 
 
/usr/bin/pcastaction flatten --prb="/Users/johnjohn/Desktop/movs/" --input="$FILE".mov  --output="$FILE"flat.mov 

done

where:

  • my video files are in a folder movs on my desktop.
  • The image UI want to add is example.jpg on my desktop.
  • My username on the mac is john

2. Save it as brand.sh (make it a plain text file if using textEdit not an rtf one)

3. open the terminal

4. type cd Desktop and hit return this move you to the Desktop where you can worm on the files

5.type chmod +x brand.sh and return this make the file executable(able to run)

6. type ./brand.sh this runs the file

you will see a lot of stuff speed past in the terminal.

After it finishes look in the movs folder:

for each file.mov that was there originally there will be a file.mov.mov which is a reference movie with the image added at the end and one named file.movflat.mov which is a self-contained quicktime movie and the one you want.

There will also be a folder Contents which you can delete, it was a folder used by pcastaction when working.

Here is a Screencast which may make thing a little clearer.

If you are a mac user, and have a lot of repetitive video task to do it might be worth having a wee look at pcastaction.

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River Tales

I am listening so some great pupil podcasts on Mr O’D’s class posterous pupils take on the role of a river and tell their life story:
Rachael does Rivers and
Kyle and the Nile for example. They show, in my opinion, the power of mashing up subjects and reinforce for me the value of podcasting and the voice.

Regular Gems

The User Outcomes section of Doug’s new Synechism Ltd. blog is turning up some nice stuff, this week’s gem for mac users is One Thing Well A weblog about simple, useful software.

UK Sound Map

I didn’t realise that the great UK Sound Map project was limited to a year and read:

The final date for uploads to the UK Soundmap is Friday 24 June, 2011. No new recordings will be added after then, but the UK Soundmap will remain online and you’ll still be able to listen to its collection of sounds.

I really meant to add a boo from work yesterday but got caught up in other things. There is a fair racket as the school, behind which I work, is being renovated. I had a good time contributing to the map and felt quite sad to learn it had finished. Visit the SoundMap and enjoy listening to sounds.

Listening to more podcasts

I’ve been listening to more podcasts recently thanks to Instacast. I’ve removed podcasts from the iPod app of my phone and don’t sync them via itunes anymore. Instacast allows you to build subscriptions (I imported from the iPod app before stopping the sync) and download episodes without being tied to a computer in a much simpler way than the ipod app. I can now sync my podcasts at the office before the drive home, rather than noticing that I had forgotten to sync my phone from my computer at home.

Instacast allows you to see the episodes you have downloaded, and also stream new ones. This can lead to a hammering of your data allowance.

I am presuming that with iOS 5 that apple will have some sort of similar setup too. It is certainly the way I want to go with mobile stuff.

The interface of instacast is nice, very minimal, although the text is a wee bit too small for my eyes at any distance. Well worth £1.19 even if Applce come up with something as good in iOS 5.

Islay high School

Joe Wilson blogs about Islay High School a reminder of all the great work going on there over the past few years. Good to be reminded that it is not the tech:

Beyond the technology they timetable 3rd to 6th year together – which leads to a great community feel in the senior school. This allows for personalised timetables over 3 or 4 years – this gives learners a large range of academic and vocational options and allows some to really stretch themselves – a few 5th years have achieved Advanced Highers.

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I am an edutalkr

it is now well over a year since EDUtalk kicked off.

EDUtalk is a project to gather the voices of educators using mobile technology.The idea is that anyone can join in and post audio snippets to the site. This can be done in several ways.

Looking over the last week shows a strong and varied collection of voices:

That was a pretty interesting mix of content. I’ve got into the habit of listening to the podcast in my car and every episode has given me something to think about. There is an open invitation to anybody interested in education to post content to EduTalk in a variety of ways: How to EDUtalk fell free to join in any time. You can also contat myself @johnjohnston or @parslad for more information or help.

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Boos on map

I love Audioboo. We use it as one of the ways to publish to edutalk.cc and I’ve joined in tagging some boos uksm for the UK Sound Map project.

Audioboo must be one of the simplest ways to do audio podcasting and it has many nice features. One of the ones that interests me most is the fact that the RSS feed has geo information in it, that is the location that the boo was recorded in (users can I believe turn this off). I have played about with the google maps api in simple ways (eg some walks) and really like the ability to tell a story in space as well as time.

Yesterday I though I’d have a look at the Audio Boo RSS feed (atom really) and see if I could do something similar.

Since google maps support GEORSS I though I’d give that a try first, pasting my audioboo feed into the search box on google maps give me this map which shows the boos without the audio players (no flash support).

I had forgotten about the audioboo api so just recycled some of my old walks stuff

I made a few Adjustments, I usually use magpie RSS Reader for RSS parsing, but I could not get it to work for the tag, due, I expect, to the colon. I therefore switched to the XMLParser provided by Adam A Flynn. The webpage explains that it can manage tags with dashes and colons but I am not sure how to as it is not in the docs yet (As far as I know). I just replaced georss:point with georsspoint and got on with it. The page is pretty much a mess of php and javascript but it works. I took the lazy way out to put audio players in the Google Map info bubbles, I used the html5 audio tag. That means that pre html5 browsers will not see it but this is not vital stuff. On the walk maps I’ve used an flash player so that is doable too.

I am caching the rss feed from AudioBoo so updates might not appear. It would be easy enough to set this up so that the page would load boos from a user or tag in the url /boo.php?tag=thetag or /boo.php?user=user too, but might effect my bandwidth.

Gmap Icon Shadow

The other interesting thing I found was Shadowmaker a webpage that makes shadows for google map icons which is a nice touch. On the walk maps I never got round to doing that. Shadowmaker makes it so easy that I could not avoid it.

Anyway I think this would be a really nice way to podcast a school trip, once a page like this is in place it will reflect any updates to AudioBoo. You could also make one that would map a boos that were tagged with a particular tag although I don’t think AudioBoo had feeds for tags from a particular user?

I’d love to hear from anyone with a class or school interested in a project like this and lend a hand.

If you are interested in learning about custom google maps I’d recommend the Google Maps API Tutorial.

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Edutalk

Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project

A bit of a mouthful, but this is the title of our Scottish Learning Festival Seminar.

David Noble and myself will be running a seminar: Sharing Curriculum Change through the EDUtalk Project to talk about Edutalk on Wednesday 22 September at 12:30

We will be explaining how the EduTalk project kicked off at the Scottish Learning festival last year with SLFtalk which recorded the voices of educators attending the Scottish Learning Festival 2009. and grew from there.

We will hopefully give practical demonstrations of how the technology works and explain the thinking behind it. It should be fun.

SLFtalk 2010

As part of EDUtalk we hope that folk will be creating short reports and thoughts about SLF on EDUtalk, in the same way as last year but using the tag edutalk on audioboo and iPadio. Participants can also email audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com or phone Gabcast (033 0808 0214 channel 30938 and # password 1234 and # when asked
record your audio and press # when finished)

Full details of how to send audio to EduTalk are on the How to EDUtalk page. Further help from twitter: @johnjohnston or @parslad

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T“>

On Thursday I took part in a Glowing Thursdays event, presenting about podcasting, I’ve put my slides together with an audio recording of the event. I’ve done a little editing mostly to cut out a phone call interruption (I left in the first ring to explain the subsequent loss of my train of thought) and to add the answers from the Q&A at the end as I failed to capture the audio of the questions. Anyway here is the video, click to play.

I’ve also uploaded just the audio

or download from my iDisk. There is a larger version of the movie here: MobileMe Gallery – Podcasting Glowing Thursdays

Here is a list of the links mentioned:

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike photo by Seven Morris

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This week on my Work blog:
DSi at Dykehead Views from the pupils at Dykehead Primary on using DSi in class.
Cathedral Podcast in Cathedral Primary School demonstrating podcasting to Mrs Shearer, Emma and Olivia from Primary Seven, they will be podcasting soon!

I was also delighted to listen to this podcast: The Egypt Topic P3 I had worked wish some pupils at Woodlands Primary School in an after school club, producing some podcasts, this is their first independent episode and I hope to listen to many more.

AudioBoo: Podcasting in the Classroom an audio extract from my Glowing Thursdays presentation (the whole thing will be published later).