Students upload their podcasts to itunes

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, come on must be at least one of you! You will have seen my recent posts on creating revision podcasts. This is a follow up to that where my students have progressed in making their podcasts by making them slightly more professional and making them available to a wider audience by uploading to youtube.

It is really early days with this at the moment and we hope to produce more professional ones in the foreseeable future. Do your students upload their own material to itunes? We would be interested in hearing more about what they are doing so please leave a comment.

So my students recently had their first go of audacity to create their first revision podcasts so I decided to give them the opportunity to create a more advanced more professional sounding podcast by adding a BED. Now if you have worked or are familiar with the radio industry a BED is a background music track with the DJ will talk over, by adding a music track with no singing often an instrumental it creates a more professional sound. One of the advantages the students said was that it made the podcast more entertaining and interesting to listen to which is fantastic!

So the problem is where and what music can you put in the background? It is difficult to get free copyright music that you can use but there are some sites out there or you can buy a CD with library tracks pretty cheaply these days. Once you get the background music students can then record their podcast and save it. Actually another way of creating copyright free music is to grab a keyboard a create your own very simple tune and record this on to audacity!

Once they save their podcast they then need to upload this to itunes. The easiest way we found to do this is with help from Jose Picardo – you can visit his post on creating a podcast in 5 easy steps, there is even a video which my students found really useful: http://www.boxoftricks.net/?p=367 Jose is Head of MFL at Nottingham High School and has some really innovative ideas in using other web 2.0 tools please check out his site or follow him on twitter @josepicardo.

It was really simple to actually upload the podcast – I suggest watching the video as it made it really easy for my students. You basically upload your podcast to a site called podomatic, you can actually record it directly on to the site and it is free. From here you have to publish your podcast to itunes. This is really easy and straightforward, you simply go to submit a podcast on itunes and copy and paste the RSS feed that podomatic automatically produces for you. Then after it is verified and checked by itunes you have your own podcast!

Our class have only spent an hour on this so far but managed to upload some, we hope to refine and improve them after the students practice more. You can hear one by one of my students on Polymers by clicking on the link: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=352195733

The students loved creating these podcasts and really are amazed that their work is on itunes! What do you think?