more on podcasting

Once again, this past week, I took my laptop in my car (not recommended) and played it, full-volume, so that I could listen to a podcast as I did one of my many errands behind the wheel. Good thing I didn’t have to stop short! It certainly was a far cry from the portability of an iPod or mp3 player, but it solved the problem of the moment. But I bet it looked pretty strange to anyone who might have happened to notice what I was doing :-)

I was a much happier camper when I finally figure out how to “rewind” a podcast that I was playing in iTunes or Windows Media Player. It’s easy to do on an iPod, but it wasn’t obvious to me when running the software on my computer. Learning how to do this definitely let me be a lot friendlier to people who tried to interrupt me 35 minutes into a 40-minute podcast.

Making a podcast, on the other hand, was an entirely different experience. I definitely had fun playing with Audacity, and I thought it was very easy to learn. Compared to multimedia software I struggled to learn this past year, it was a dream, and I expect it will be much more useful to me in a school setting, in the long term, than being able to design webpages and build animations. I haven’t yet listened to all of the podcasts that our class has recorded, but the ones I’ve heard thus far were excellent, and so varied!

On the other hand, I was totally unprepared for the way I reacted to being recorded – initially, I completely froze! It’s really funny, I didn’t expect this at all, because I didn’t have an audience staring at me. I didn't expect stage fright! Richardson makes a comment about a podcaster’s sense of audience – how good podcasters are aware of the people who are going to be listening to them. I guess I was a little too aware! It was a bit easier at the end, and I suppose with practice I would be much more comfortable. But something very definitely to consider when offering this technology for students to use – some may be very uncomfortable with it, at least initially. We have to design time to let them learn the tool and get comfortable with the sound of their own voice - maybe scaffold them by letting them read some of their own work, before they record conversation or interviews. Once they become good at editing, I think it will help them feel free to improvise - they don't have to make it "perfect" as they record it.