What Is Podcasting

Easy Creation of an

Educational Podcast

for Teaching and Learning using iLife ‘06

By Andrew Bare

What is Podcasting?

The term podcast comes from the combination of the words iPod and Broadcasting. Podcasting is an audio or video recording, often done in the style of a radio or tv broadcast that has been made available for subscription on the internet. What makes podcasting unique beyond audio or video clips that have been posted on websites, is the subscription service of podcasts. This means every time a new episode of a particular podcast is placed onto the internet by its creator, it is automatically sent to an entire list of subscribers. Probably the easiest tool for receiving podcasts (called a podcatcher) is iTunes. iTunes is a free download, and can be used on both PC’s and Macs.

What can I use podcasting for?

People use podcasting in a variety of ways, but here we are most interested in using podcasts as a medium for educational information. Suppose you are heading out of town for a week, but still want to do your weekly lecture. You could record an audio or video podcast that would be sent out to all of your students to listen to or watch from their home computer. Perhaps you are teaching a language course and would like to develop learning tools to help students with their pronunciation, you could record the proper pronunciations of a number of terms as a podcast that would be sent to all of your students to work from. Suppose you have access to someone who would be a great guest lecturer for your class, but is unable to come to your actual classtime, you could sit them down at a microphone or in front of a video camera and record a podcast of their lecture to send to your students. Any educational ideas you have involving audio or video can be made into podcasts. Podcasting can also help you conserve class time by allowing students to watch videos or listen to audio recordings on their own time outside of class. The additional reward of using podcasts in your classes is that it could help your students become more interested in using technology in general and perhaps help them learn more about this new technology that is being used more and more frequently in the business world.

What do you need to start?

To create an audio podcast from this tutorial you will need an Apple computer, iLife ’06 software package, a microphone, and a microphone preamp of some kind. The preamp both boosts your microphone signal and can allow you to connect the microphone to the computer. We recommend the Griffin iMic. It allows you to easily plug in a microphone and connect it to your computer. The Strosacker lab on the third floor of the Swanson Academic Center has both a microphone and a Griffin iMic available if you would like to create your podcast in the lab. You may also have a built-in microphone on your computer. If you do, you can use that (though the quality of the recording wont be quite as professional). If you do have a built-in microphone on your computer, and aren’t that concerned with professional level sound, that may be an easy and inexpensive way to create your podcast.

To create a video podcast, you will need at least a video camera and a computer. You may want to make sure that the camera has either a firewire output or at least a USB output for connecting to a computer. However, if you are using mini-DV tapes you don’t really need to worry too much about that as the strosacker lab has mini-DV decks you can use to import your video into a computer. Most video cameras do come with their own microphones. If you wanted the video to be as professional as possible, connecting some kind of external mic would be ideal, but if you are just recording a video lecture for your students and are somewhat near the camera, the camera mic will most likely get the job done. Simply set up the camera and record your video.

It is also important to note that you can do audio podcasts and video podcasts interchangeably in a given subscription. This allows you to do an audio lecture one week, and a video lecture the next, and the student will receive the podcast in the exact same way (via iTunes) either way.

Recording your audio podcast using GarageBand 3

To begin recording your podcast, you will need a microphone as well as a microphone preamp. As I stated before, the Strosacker lab has both a microphone and a Griffin iMic that allows you to connect the external microphone through a USB connection.

Once you have a microphone connected to your computer you will need to tell the computer that you plan on using that microphone instead of any built-in microphone the computer may have. To do this, choose Apple Menu > System Preferences, then choose Sound.

If you are using the iMic, you will want to select iMic USB audio system in the Input section. Other preamps and microphone connections will be names slightly differently. If you are using anything else connected to your computer through USB, you can look for USB under Port to help you figure out which sound input is your microphone. Once you have selected your audio input, you are ready to begin your podcast.

Next you will want to open up GarageBand. Make sure you have the version of GarageBand that came with iLife ’06 or higher. It should be at least version 3.0 . At the first screen prompt choose ‘New Podcast Episode’, give it a file name, and click Create.

You should now see the GarageBand interface.

The first thing you will need to do is make sure your microphone is selected as the audio input within GarageBand. Choose GarageBand >Preferences, then select Audio/MIDI. Change your audio input to iMic USB audio system (or whatever audio system you have connected).

Now return to your main GarageBand interface and select either the Male or Female voice track to begin. When selected the track should turn blue. You can now talk into the microphone to make sure your audio levels are ok. You don’t want your audio levels to peak in the red, adjust them as necessary using the volume bar right below the levels.

You are now ready to record your podcast. Simply click on the red record button in the bar below the tracks and begin talking. You will see the playhead move to the left in the timeline as you are recording. Don’t worry about mistakes you make, simply repeat the line and you can cut out any mistakes later. When you have completed your recording, click on the space bar to stop. You can now listen to your recording by moving the playhead back to the beginning and pressing the play button on the interface.

While listening to your podcast, you will want to make sure your levels are not going into the red. If they are, you can adjust them down using the volume bar right below the levels.

There are a number of ways to add music and sound effects to your podcast and you can explore that either on your own or by asking the Alma College instructional technologist, for the purposes of this tutorial, we are sticking with the basics of recording a podcast so as to not make this introduction to podcasting too complicated. If you start getting into audio podcasting however, I certainly recommend getting into adding music and sound effects. It is very easy to do this, and they can add a great deal to your podcast.

The only other thing you may want to know how to do before sending off your podcast is how to edit the podcast. This is actually very simple. To make a cut, simply place your playhead in the timeline at the point where you would like to make the cut, click on the track you want to edit so it is highlighted, and press “Apple-T” (The Apple button and T button together). To delete a section of the clip you would have to do this at the beginning and end of the section you want to delete, then highlight that section and press delete. To highlight a new section click off of the track in any of the blank tracks, then click the section of track you want highlighted. You can also drag together clips after cutting out pieces by holding down your mouse button on the clip and dragging it to the left until it is up against the clip before it. Remember to save your project.

You are now done recording your podcast! To move on to getting this podcast out to your students select Share > Send Podcast to iWeb. This will send your podcast to iWeb where you can easily create a webpage to put on Othello that will contain your podcasts as well as allow students to subscribe to your podcast!

Using iWeb to publish your podcasts

Your computer will ask you at this point if you would like a .mac account. Click on Close. Because you have an Othello account you will not need a .mac account to publish your podcasts to the web.

The first thing iWeb will ask you is to choose a template for your webpage. You can choose any of the styled templates offered by iWeb, but then choose ‘podcast’ as your page type. Click ‘choose’. I have chosen the white template.

Your site only needs to have one page. If you are showing a welcome page or some other page besides your podcast page, feel free to delete it. You can see that your podcast page actually contains three pages. This main podcast page, an entries page, and an archive page. iWeb has done all the hard work for you!! Everything is already designed and ready to go, you simply need to replace the placeholder information with your own. Where it says “My Podcast” you can type in the main title of your regular podcast. You can then replace the placeholder text below the title with an introduction to your overall regular podcast. If you have a photo you would like to use on this page, all you need to do is drag and drop it over the placeholder photo. I have replaced the title, main info, and photo, and now my page looks like this:

Next, you will want to adjust the information in the placeholder of your actual podcast. To adjust this information, click on Entries in the left menu. Here you can access your actual podcast. You can now change the title of this individual podcast episode as well as the information about this episode. You can also listen to your podcast right on this page by clicking on play on the quicktime movie. Students will be able to listen from your website in the exact same way if they so choose. Once you have changed the info in your entry you can return to your main podcast page and see the changes that have been made there as well. Click on ‘Podcast’ in the left menu to return to the main page.

You can see that the info on your podcast episode has now automatically changed on the first page as well! One final thing you can change on your page before publishing to the web is the word “podcast” at the top of your page. To change this to something else, such as “welcome to Andrew’s podcast”, double-click on the word podcast in the left menu and type in a new title. Hit return. You will now see the new title on your webpage.

Publishing your Webpage to Othello

In order to have your page and podcasts online and accessible by other people you will need to publish it to your Othello account. To do this, first you must access your personal Othello account. In the Finder menu bar, choose Go > Connect to Server. Choose othello.alma.edu as your server address then click on Connect. Type in your username and password and again click Connect. Then mount the folder with your username by selecting that folder and choosing OK.

In your username folder there is a folder titled Sites. Anything placed in that folder will be available on the internet. This is where you will publish your webpage.

Now go back to your iWeb project. Choose File > Publish to a Folder. Select your username Othello folder, then the sites folder. You will also need to enter the URL for your folder. My URL is othello.alma.edu/~bare Replace ‘bare’ with your username and that is your URL. That will take you to you podcast page. Click on Choose. Then click Continue. Your webpage is now on the web!! It is saved in your Sites folder as index.html. If you already have a webpage in your sites folder with that URL, you can create a new folder in your sites folder and it will create an index.html in that new folder. If you do that however, make sure you include the new folder in the URL when you publish your site. For example, if I saved my site in a new folder titled ‘podcast’ my URL would be othello.alma.edu/~bare/podcast

Your podcast is now available to students to listen to from your page or subscribe to through iTunes. In the next section I will show you how they can do this.

Subscribing to your podcast using iTunes

Now here are the instructions on how a student would subscribe to the podcast you have just created and added the first episode to:

First of all they would need to go to your webpage. They would type in othello.alma.edu/~YOURUSERNAME to get there. Once there they can click on the “subscribe” button iWeb has put on your page for you. This should automatically subscribe them if they have the latest version of iTunes. If not, this button will take them to the rss page for your site. All they need to do now is copy the URL in the address bar by choosing Edit > Copy. Then open up iTunes, choose Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast, then Paste the URL in and click on OK.