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Podcast Feast

Jan 3rd, 2012
by pollyalida.
2 comments

I’m still a day or two behind – this is for Day 7 of #blog12daysxmas!

This was a busy weekend with more family visiting. And that meant more cooking. And cooking means lots of time to listen to podcasts. I love listening to podcasts while I cook, sometimes it slows me down a bit while I stop chopping & stirring to jot down notes, but it’s wonderful to have so much great company in my kitchen. It often feels a bit strange though when I finish cooking and realize that these folks aren’t really there and ready to eat dinner with me.

This past weekend I got to share my kitchen with Buffy Hamilton and the Bibliotech gang,  Steve Thomas and Dave Lankes (Circulating Ideas), and Maurice Coleman and Jill Hurst-Wahl (T is for Training).

Since some other library folks have shared their lists of favorite podcasts, I’ll share mine too.

  • Tech Chick Tips – Two educators from Texas who cover tons of great resources for all grades and subjects. They also ♥ their iThings (so do I) and share lots of great apps for iThings.
  • T is for Training – Biweekly podcasts about training & teaching in library settings. Maurice Coleman has been hosting this ever-changing feast of topics and participants for 3 years, wow!   Don’t just listen, call in and participate, it’s a fun and friendly crowd.
  • Circulating Ideas – Steve Thomas’ monthly conversation with a innovative leaders in the library field. Lots of great ideas are circulated.
  • Bibliotech – Discusses all things digital technology at our libraries. Hosted by Kayhan B., Erin Anderson and Doug Mirams.

And more! Adventures in Library Instruction,  TWIT – This week in Tech, Hack Education Podcast and of course Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

There are even more listed on these blog posts. I haven’t had a chance to listen to all of these yet.

 

Screencasting & Podcasting classes

Mar 12th, 2010
by pollyalida.
1 comment

Since I don’t teach the same groups of people all the time, I don’t often get to see what the folks in my classes do with what they’ve learned. But this week two librarians let me  know how they’d put their learning to work! I  love it  when that happens!

Sam Cook of the U of Hartford  Allen Library was in my Screencasting class on Wednesday. Today, he posted his first tutorial to the library website! Speedy! And he did a terrific job.

During the same class, Gretchen Durley of the Terryville (CT) PL told me about the project she’d launched after the Podcasting class she’d taken some months ago. She holds a monthly Discussion & Dessert book group for 3rd & 4th graders. As part of that they record their reactions and reviews of each month’s books. And what fun and thoughtful reviews these kids are doing.  Have a listen and see if you don’t agree.

A big thanks to Gretchen and Sam for sharing what they’ve created.

AudioBoo & Vocaroo & Google Earth

Dec 9th, 2009
by pollyalida.
1 comment

This morning I saw a tweet that led me to a wiki that mentioned a blog post that answered a question I didn’t realize I had – yet! The question was how to add audio to placemarks in Google Earth. One of the school library systems I work with is offering a session on Google Lit Trips. And being able to have students add their own voices would be terrific. Tom Barrett outlines the steps to do this in his blog post: Google Earth is our Paper – Part 2: Add your Voice

Vocaroo is the handy recording tool that he recommended using. No accounts to set up, just go to the site, click on Record and well, record! That’s it. Your audio is saved and Vocaroo gives you options to download your audio, share it via a link directly to the file and code to embed it on a web page. It’s the embed code you need to add it to the Google Earth placemarks. Easy!

I was hoping I could do the same with AudioBoo, another easy to use voice recorder that I love. But I couldn’t get the embed code to work with the Google Earth placemarks. I’ll fiddle with it some more when I get a chance.

Despite that, if you haven’t seen AudioBoo, take a look. It’s a handy way to get short audio recordings posted quickly. There’s an iPhone app for recording on the go (I want a Droid app please!), you can record directly to the web site and you can upload files in a variety of formats. Your ‘boos’ have an rss feed and can also be posted directly to Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, FriendFeed and Tumblr. There’s also code for embedding the boos on other web pages.

What other tools are you using to record audio?

Fixing podcasts that don’t play on my mp3 player

Sep 9th, 2008
by pollyalida.
No comments yet

I love my handy dandy little Archos 104 mp3 player, but there are some podcasts that just won’t play on it. In particular the wonderful library programs from OPAL just freeze up.

I contacted the Archos help desk folks who were very responsive and figured out that those podcasts were produced at a low sampling rate and for some reason this little Archos player couldn’t play them. The Archos folks promised to put it on their list of fixes. Oddly, all those podcasts play just fine on my older Archos AV 500 media player.

In the meantime I found a fix. Open the mp3 file in Audacity, change the sampling rate to 22,050 khz or 44,100 khz (“Project Rate” menu at the bottom of the work screen) and Export as MP3. The file is bigger, but it plays on my player.  Yay.

And if anyone is confused by bit rates vs sampling rates, this post Bit Rate Resolution and Sampling Rate for Dummies has a nice explanation that made sense for my non-audiophile brain.