Publishing/Hosting Podcasts

[Miss M]

I have a good grasp on the basics of podcasting. I have had my tech department download audacity and the LAME encoder on the library computers, I have all my microphones, and I have already had several classes come to the library to record some podcasts. Now, however, I am stuck and I really need some help!!! I don't want to lose the momentum and energy that these podcasting projects have created among the students and teachers! I cannot for the life of me figure out how to put these podcasts on the Internet. I have read so many articles, websites, tutorials, etc., but I always feel they are very vague on this point.
I thought about gcast, but I want each students podcast to be available for hearing, not just the most recently created.
I created an edublog hoping to host them there, but storage space will be a problem if I upload each mp3 individually.
How do you handle this?

[John Crowley]

Well, if you can use a Mac with a recent iLife (08 or 09), you would use iWeb and publish your website (with podcast link) to a MobileMe account. ($99/yr). This is the simplest way to podcast.
If you have to stay in Windows, this is what my Web 2.0 guru (Ian Cieplik) recommends:
"I would either suggest iWeb+MobileMe, like you said, or going through blogspot.com/blogger.com ˆ the blog management tools are really user-friendly, google is currently up to about 8gb of free storage space per user, and uploading any kind of file is very easy. It also scales quite well in case their needs grow."

[Miss M]

Thanks for the tip. We are using windows, so I am definitely going to look into creating a blog to host the podcasts.

[J.Robertson]

Great question - you're not the first to wonder about this tiny but vital part of podcasting. I don't have a solution for you, since I use a Mac, but I do have one word of warning based on John Crowley's suggestion. Make sure your school board allows the blog you end up posting the podcasts on. My school board blocks blogspot. I didn't know this, and many years ago now, I spent a long time creating a great reader's electronic discussion blog at home, and then when I was ready to launch it at school, I found out that the board blocked the site! So... make sure you can access whatever blog hosting site you end up using BEFORE you invest too much time in the project. Good luck.

[Betty Jordan]

I use podbean and find it to be user friendly and you can set how many you want on a page before they are archived. All of them are available and listeners can subscribe. And it's free.

[Milena Streen]

I am so glad you asked this question, I too have been trying to figure this last step on our podcasting journey. We use windows at school, so the Mac options are out for us as well. Audacity is great with recording, but we needed to have a place to store the podcasts so that they would be accessible to the entire class (we're creating podcasts of a poetry slam for our creative writing class) . I just created a Gcast account and thought I would try out a sample podcast - just to see how it worked. I didn't realize it just gave you access to only the most recently created podcast. We won't start recording our podcasts until the end of April - please let me know how it worked out for you - i.e., which system you used to publish your podcasts. I'll definitely have to look into podbean as well.

[Betty Jordan]

If you want to take a look at my podbean page to see how it works, here is a link: http://bjordan.podbean.com/ My principal has an edublog and posts a podcast every week or so on it.

[Just One More Book! Children's Book Podcast]

You and your students are always welcome to contribute to our JustOneMoreBook! Children's literature/literacy podcast. We'd love it if you would send us your thoughts on a favourite children's book so we can include your audio in an upcoming edition of our show.

To participate, leave a voicemail message on our Love Of Reading Hotline (1+206-350-6487) or record and send an .mp3 file to [e-mail]

Hoping to include your voice soon,
Andrea Ross