Well the end of the course is upon us and I have to say that my learning has been enormous. From not even having heard about e learning to being able to create a podcast and create a class Wiki I feel I have learnt so much.
The podcast has to have been the most stressful as I could not get it to go onto the dropbox and after about an hour of trying I then tried to export it use wave rather than the other option which finally enable me to link to it on my blog. Before all that was happening was that it was bringing in all the data but no podcast with any audio. Now at least there is audio and my ideas can be expressed in a totally different manner than they ever have before. E Portfolios within my school are step in the right direction and I hope that through my learning on this course I can encourage other teachers to explore the possiblities that e learning has to offer as the educational, learning and teaching benefits for children are huge.
Michelle, I don't know why you have been having such trouble with the podcasts, but I can suggest a few things. Ir seems strange that you were having difficulties uploading the file to your Dropbox site and I wonder if you were trying to save the "Audacity" files - these are a special type of file that only Audacity can read but they are not useful for your audience and it is necessary to export the files (as I think that you discovered).
ReplyDeleteThe best format to export the files is as MP3, which is the standard podcast format that you will find on the web. Unfortunately, for copyright readons, if you are using Audacity you have to download an additional file which does this (the information is given on the Audacity web site). MP3 is better thatn WAV as the files are much smaller and hence easier to send over the Internet. They are also easier to play in a web browser - I found that to listen to your podcast I had to download it and play it from the desktop (I yse VLC Player, but Windows Media Player works, and I probablky iTunes.
The sound level on the your recording was quite low, so it would be good to experiment with settings of the recording level in Audacity to see what gives the best results.
Don't give up. but build on your success so far in creating Podcasts. I was interested to read Anne Caweley's post about the value that she found podcasts to provide her children, after a very slow start in gettting going.
Tony