Friday, February 25, 2011

iPods, iPhones and iPads Everywhere: Project Podcasting

Screen Shot of iTunes
What Is Podcasting?
  • Podcasting is a method of publishing audio and video files, graphics, and even PDFs to the internet and making them available for subscription-based download to a computer or MP3 player.
  • Podcasts can be played on a variety of devices.
  • Subscription to the podcast through RSS feeds or XML allows users to automatically download new podcasts to their desktop.
  • Podcasting allows for flexibility; an audience or learner can listen when, where and how they want.

3 comments:

Emily said...

Why Use Podcasts?

•Share a one-time event with anyone who couldn't attend
• Archive your lectures online for student review
•Create reusable tutorials for lab work or other common processes
• Use video or audio to demonstrate difficult concepts
•Capture travel experiences for educational use
• "Push" your course materials and announcements to your students' desktops autmomatically
• Share research findings with colleagues and peer institutions
• Simplify your students' multimedia projects

Emily said...

Audio, Enhanced, or Video?

An audio podcast is an audio-only mp3 file. An enhanced podcast includes still images along with the audio. A video podcast many contain both audio and video.

Emily said...

Which one will work for you?

If you want to record lectures, consider audio. At least one prominent study shows that, while students expected to benefit most from lectures recorded to video, they found in practice that audio files were more convenient, less distracting, and equally informative.

Enhanced and video podcasts are ideal for creating reusable demonstrations; best practices for using a microscope, for instance, or how to recognize common diseases in a horse. They are also excellent mediums for capturing travel, interviews, or unusual experiences. An instructor may document her trip to Brazil for classroom or research use, or even ask her students to create multimedia "tours" of a local point of interest. In the end, the best format is the one that is most effective in highlighting your material.