Podcasting in the Classroom Presented by: Jason Arruzza, AIS.

Podcasting in the Classroom

Presented by:

Jason Arruzza, AIS

What is Podcasting?

a digital audio file (usually MP3 or AAC) made available for download on the internet through an RSS 2.0 feed.

The web address of the media file is contained in the enclosure tag of an item in the XML file.

A podcast's RSS feed is updated each time a new media file is published.

An aggregator for podcasts (such as iTunes or iPodder) is used to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Who can podcast?

anyone can create their own “radio”-style show and broadcast it to the world in very little time and at very little cost.

required: a computer, a mic and the internet.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

What is Audacity?

Audacity is a rapidly evolving multi-platform soundfile editor that is freely available

Audacity 1.2.3 includes:

a good set of editing tools,

support for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA) effects,

multitrack recording capability.

Its user interface is well-designed, uncluttered and simple to navigate.

Supported file formats include WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, and MP3; Audacity also exports to OGG format.

Standard cut/copy/paste operations are supported as well as Undo/Redo functions.

Resources

Audacity homepage/download

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Audacity Help, FAQ, etc

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation

Audacity Tutorials

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials

Audacity wiki

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/

Audacity User Manual

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/audacity-manual-1.2.zip

About sound files

The most popular and most common cross-platform uncompressed audio file formats are .AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format - Mac) and .WAV (Microsoft Windows Wave).

both support 16-bit, 44 KHz stereo and polyphonic sound (sound with more than two channels).

this quality is approximately 10MB per minute in size since it is high quality).

audio file formats include u-law, which use the suffix .au and so are often called AU files

MPEG audio (suffix .mpeg and .mpg). MPEG files are compressed (ie: ~ 1/5 the size of a.wav or .aiff file) but with a slight loss of quality.

When creating a sound file can set preferences to adjust the quality of the file by adjusting Bit Rate, Channel and Sample Width

basically choosing a mono channel together with the lowest sample width and the lowest sample rate you will create a lower quality, smaller file.

Ogg is an advanced binary audio format similar to the mp3 format. It is patent and royalty free, and is supported on most platforms.

Bit Rate

is the frequency at which bits are passing a given "point".

quantified using the bit per second (bit/s) unit.

bit rate measures number of bits/time

4 kbit/s – minimum necessary for recognizable speech

8 kbit/s – telephone quality

32 kbit/s – MW quality

96 kbit/s – FM quality

128 kbit/s – CD quality

Source: Wikipedia

Audacity Activity:

Import a sound/music file into a track

Record a new voice track over

Edit as necessary

Add effects

Save as.mp3 file

Contact DetailsJason Arruzza

Education Consultant – ICT Across the Curriculum

Level 4, 99 York Street, Sydney NSW 2000

Phone (02) 9299 2845 Fax (02) 9290 2274

Web aisnsw.edu.au Email [email protected]

ABN 96 003 509 073