Reflection for Making a Podcast

I made my podcast for The Nose Book by Al Perkins, Illustrated by Joe Mathiew. The background music is Spring Song, by Mendelssohn. I chose this book, because it is one of my little boy's favorite books. I enjoy the rhyming and the humor.

Making this podcast was quite the adventure for me. I learned a lot about this process. I first tried to use Garage Band, but I couldn't get the background music in. I finally downloaded Audacity, I recorded the book 1st and then tried to import the audio. I spent an afternoon reading the Audacity help page and realized that I had to 1st import the audio, but it had to be converted to an .aiff file. I finally got the microphone set at the correct level so that the audio and voice worked well together. It was time to export the file. Now this is when I realized that I downloaded an older version of Audacity that wasn't compatible for my operating system to export the file as a .mp3. After time on the audacity website trying to figure out what was going wrong, I finally got it. I had to download a LameLib program to make the exporting possible with Audacity.

Okay--I had the podcast complete. Now I needed to get it posted to my blog. After messing with Audacity for an afternoon, I figured I'd just go to the Blogger help page right away. Here I found that I needed to find a free hosting site to store my podcast. I found http://box.net and signed up for an account and uploaded my podcast. I came back to my blog and followed the Blogger instructions to make the link be accessible on the posting page. I copied the url for my podcast stored at http://box.net in the enclosure link box of my compose posting page. Because I did not have a premium account at box.net, I could not use this feature of Blogger to direct link to the audio file. I finally came up with the idea to post the share link in the post box. Yes! It works!

I guess I learned that it is best to find out the correct way to do something by going to the help page first. I spent a lot of time doing and redoing and trying to figure out what was going wrong on my own. After I researched the correct way to do the podcast, it was extremely simple. I'm glad this opportunity was given to us to make a podcast and get in posted. I will remember how to do this because I had learned by doing.

I would love to use podcasting in my first grade classroom this coming year. I would start off by recording some of the favorite read-alouds and post them to my classroom blog. I would have students go and listen to the podcasts during center time. As the year moves on, I would like for my kids to record their favorite story as a podcast and post it to a class wiki. I can see many ways to use podcasting when I move into a teacher-librarian position. I would love to see students write their own radio shows and record book reviews. The ideas are endless.

One of the podcasts that I downloaded to listen to was from the Classics For Kids website at www.classicsforkids.com. Each week, they choose a composer of classical music and play the music in the background while the children are taken on a journey through the music. The piece is broken down and explained why each section was composed. The podcast I listened to was Children's Corner by Claude Debussy. There were sections about rocking an elephant to sleep, dancing snowflakes, and a shepherd in the mountains. It was fun to be taken through the music and to hear and understand what the different sections were about. The website has a section for teachers that has lesson plans for using classical music as part of your daily classroom activities that use the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The website allowed for RSS feeds and had a schedule for when new podcasts would be added. The Classics For Kids is part of the Cincinnati Public Radio, Inc and is on the radio at a scheduled time every week. I felt Classics For Kids did adhere to the copyright guidelines of the music. The length was very appropriate and perfect of younger students (about 6 minutes). I really can't wait to use this in my classroom this next year. I believe that it will be perfect for listening to during times when my little ones need some calming and refocusing.