As usual I can’t keep well enough alone and decided to push the podcast just one step further this year. So now not only can you listen to use live and chat on the website, or download the podcast later via iTunes. This year we’re also going to try to open up the Skype lines to you listeners out there and allow you to Skype in with questions or comments during the show. We’ll see how this goes and hopefully will be able to make it fly this year. We’re live every other Wednesday at 8:00pm Bangkok Time (GMT+7). The best way to keep posted on the show is by following me on Twitter.

Click the button to subscribe to our iTunes podcast feed for free!

Each show revolves around an essential question which we try to stay focused on (really we do). I’m excited for our next show and if you are at an IB school or an IB teacher you surely won’t want to miss:

I have strong feeling frustrations about the IB program as a technology person in my role. We’re excited to have Justin Medved joining us from Canada and it will be a great opportunity to open up the Skype Lines and see what others have to say on the topic.

I hope you decide to follow us this year as we have some fun from Bangkok, Thailand to Casablanca, Morroco.

SOS Podcast Links:
Subscribe to iTunes (Free)
Diigo Show link Group
Google Calendar of Show Times
Blog RSS
Skype

We have these nice older iMacs sitting in our ES HUB (a.k.a. Library). We use one to sync our 10 iPods that the PTA bought for us last year and….well….that’s it. It’s sitting there with a 150GB hard drive and all that’s on it are audiobook files.

So I had and idea while running the other day that I could download podcasts to that machine and then share the library over the internal network so that any teacher or student could access them. In doing this we allow students and teachers access to the podcasts for learning, but do not take up precious space on their local machine’s hard drives. Students…who can’t save anything locally to the laptop cart machines, would still have access to the wealth of information in the podcasts.

This is legal….as far as I know…because the podcasts are all free to begin with. We are not sharing any music or the audiobooks that are on that machine. We’re only sharing the podcasts.

So here’s how I did it:

On a Mac: Go to iTunes- Preferences
On a PC: (I believe it is Tools-Options)

Now we’re lucky as on our computer image we already had checked “Look for Shared Libraries” on all our machines. So by sharing this one library it automatically appears for the users.

Here’s what they see:

Then of course comes the fun part of finding podcasts (and putting out a call to teachers on what podcasts they like). So far here is what we’ve added.

(All links are to iTunes Store…click on them will take you to iTunes where you can subscribe for free to these podcasts)

1. Apple Quick Tips: A must have for any Apple School (do a search in iTunes…no store link)!
2. TEDTalks Video: We have some teachers addicted to these!
3. Students Teaching Students: Our very own podcast from 5th Graders.
4. CNN Student News: Found this while looking through the store…looks good!
5. SUPER WHY!: From PBS for kids (Great website as well).
6. Teaching with SmartBoards: Great videos…we have a SmartBoard in every room…do I need to say more.
7. SOS Podcast: Yes shameless self promotion…but hey I’m making the list!

So that’s where I’ve started. Anything else you would recommend adding to the list? Remember the audience is Teachers and Students.

The last thing I need to figure out is some way to organize them as they just come in as a stream with the newest download on top.

I’m pretty excited about this. A great way to spread PD across a school.

I wrote this page for the Shifting Our Schools site to share with others the set up I use to stream, record, and converse all at the same time. I thought I’d share it here as well. You can find links to the different equipment I use at my Amazon Store as well.

The Set Up:

It all starts with the Mic! You’ve gotta have a good mic to feel like you really are producing something of quality. Besides, you want the quality. I use the Samson CO3U USB Mic. I love this thing. Mounted on a shockmount, the sound quality is fantastic and you get little to know vibration noise.

Next you need a piece of software to record your podcast into. I’m digging GarageBand on the Mac, but love Audacity (Mac and PC) as well. Both programs are simple enough for you to get started, and both can expand and give you the control you want over your audio.

We’ll need a way to get the audio from Skype if you are doing an interview into the audio stream. I try and do things as cheaply as possible. On a PC I use Virtual Audio Cables (free) which will take the sound and pipe it through your sound card so that Audacity can pick it up.

On my Mac I’m finding this step to be so much easier. After reading all the reviews I broke down and bought WireTap Anywhere. This program is awesome and worth the $129 price in my opinion. You can watch the video on the site, but it is really just that easy. Tell WireTap that you want the audio from the Samson Mic and from Skype and you want it to be pushed out to GarageBand and the sound card. You can add sources on the fly, and best of all…it just works! The one thing to note is that you will want to start it before you start Firefox for streaming on the web.

OK, so now we’ve got the mic, the software to record and the system in place to push all the audio you want through your sound card we’re on to the fun stuff.

You’re gonna want some intro and exit music. You can spend a lot of time on the web searching for that perfect sound, that prefect entrance to your recording. I find Free Play Music to be a great site with loads of free to use sounds and short loops.

Or if you really want something original you can use a paid service like Beat Suite. A great site that has original sounds and all of it is Royalty Free.

If you want to stream live using a service like ustream.tv or stickam.com is easy enough to do. Just sign up for an account, create a channel and allow your audio to be piped out over the internet.

Now that we’ve got all that sorted it’s time to talk about editing your file. There are many tips and tricks you can find on the web, and at the end of the day no matter how good you are at setting the volume it always seems to be off. This person is to loud, that person can hardly be heard. Thanks to a free program created by podcasting experts you can now level your sounds to perfection. The Levelator is a must have for any podcaster. It’s simple drag and drop any .aif or .mp3 file on the program and it will level the sound for you and give you a new file that makes everyone sound perfectly the same.

So here’s how I edit my podcasts:

• I record straight into GarageBand

• I edit the recording in GarageBand, take out the mistakes, the Skyp recalls, and anything else that doesn’t sound right.

• Next I export the file in .aif uncompressed format. This keeps the sound as original as possible. I take the .aif file and run it across the Levelator to get my three or four voices at all the same level.

• Take the output track from Levelator and import it back into GarageBand. Add the intro and exit tracks (some people do this before they use Levelator….it’s up to you as I’ve found the quality to be no different) and then export as an mp3 file.

• In GarageBand I export to mp3 format at good quality. Because it’s only voice 64kbps is good enough. We’re not going to get CD quality out of a Skype call anyway and quality means size. I’d rather have an hour long podcast at 23MB than at 46MB and really not have a sound quality difference. If you look at most podcasts through iTunes you will notice that most are rendered at 64kbps.

• Next import your mp3 file into iTunes (I have a playlist called podcast just for this reason). iTunes makes it easy to edit the ID3 Tag. The little information that accompanies the mp3. This is where the title is stored, the producer, and that all so important image art that shows on the iPod.

• Lastly you need a place to put your file so others can access it. Using a blog is great, as it comes with a built in RSS Feed. People can subscribe to your podcast blog and listen to your podcast right in their reader. Or head over to iTunes click on Podcast and in the middle of the screen you’ll see the button to “Submit a Podcast”. You’ll need an RSS Feed, but after that you will have your own podcast site on iTunes. Just keep uploading files and linking them into your blog posts and iTunes will pick them up. For an easy way to do all this I recommend using a WordPress blog with the popular Podpress plugin. Or look at other options like Podango which give you a place to host your files.

So that’s it…Jeff’s guide to creating podcasts. Head on over to sospodcast.org and listen to our latest episode that was created using the equipment and steps outlines above. Or head directly to iTunes to add use to your podcast list.

podcasting, garageband, audacity, leo leporte, iTunes, wiretap anywhere, ID3 Tag, podango, sospodcast, podpress, wordpress, levelator, ustream.tv, stickam.com, beat suite, skype, samson co3u,

Google Earth Lesson (2nd Grade):

Have students pair up. (I always have kids number 1 and 2, it makes it easy to say “OK, #1 your turn to ……)

Students start Google Earth and each person is allowed 5 minutes to explore the program. Click here, click there, spin the Earth this way and that. I find I have way less interruptions if you just give kids time to explore the program “their way”. Giving just 5 minutes gets all those “what’s this do?” out of the way.

After both kids have had a turn at exploring the program, they come up to the front of the room and we talk about what they learned or found cool.

Here was the report:

• “If you click on the 3D button down there, you can then go to New York and see the building in 3D.”
• “If you search for “Queensland’ you get taken to New York. If you search for “Queens Land” you get taken to Australia.
• “I like to make the world go fast” (Funny side note, one girl in class watched the world spin to fast and had to go lay down )
• “I like how it flies you places”

Next up Questions:

• “Why are the pictures not clear on my computer but they are on yours?”
• “How do I find my house?”
• “Are these pictures like right now?”

So we took some time to answer the questions. We talked about the pictures having to download from the Internet so if you are busy spinning the world or moving to quickly the pictures don’t have time to download. We also talked about why images in the states might be clearer then say those in rural Thailand.

We talked about how you might find your house? What information would you need to know? Where could you find that information? Is just knowing Thailand enough? Or do you need to know where in Thailand. Oh, Bangkok! Great (we fly to Bangkok) Now what? Well we know we live by the old airport. What might an airport look like from space? What could we find that would tell us it’s an airport? A runway! Great! Let’s fly around slowly to see if we can find a runway.

—-

The conversation was a good one and we talked about directions and ways to look at the earth, different views, and we even played with layers. The weather layer was cool as it showed us that it was snowing in Zurich (where I’m headed for Winter holiday ).

I then showed the students how to go to View-Grid to turn on Longitude and Latitude. I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve heard kids go “WOW….COOL!” over Longitude and Latitude.

Over all it was a great introductory lesson to Google Earth. After spending about 10 minutes on the floor, I sent the students back to their desks where they each got another 5 minutes to play with Google Earth.

A quick and fun 30 minute lesson on Google Earth. Now that we have the basics down we can do some real exploration of our planet!

Audio Books (5th grade records, Pre-K Listens):

First of all when you have a teacher like Chrissy you have a real advantage to try something new or do quick little projects. The Pre-K teacher approached me a week ago and asked if there was a way to record some books for the kids to listen to and follow along. So I sent out an e-mail to the 5th grade team explaining what we needed and of course Chrissy responds in about 30 seconds!

“We’ll do it!”

• I dropped off the books on Wednesday so the 5th graders could have some time to read and practice their stories.
• On Friday I took a good USB mic and pulled kids one at a time during their reading time and recorded their voices in GarageBand.
• On Wednesday this week Chrissy gave me an hour of her class time to allow the students to edit their recordings.

When I went into the class here’s the outline of what we did.

• Listened to some audio books and podcasts and talked about what we heard? What made it ‘catchy’?
• We then discussed what a Pre-K student might need and decided that we need a ‘ding’ to tell them when to turn the page.
• We decided that we would use one of the built in malet sounds in GarageBand
• I then showed them how to split and delete a part of a track. I grabbed a piece of tape and had a student come up and cut it in half, then had another student come up and cut it again. We threw the middle piece away and taped the two ends back together. The idea: you have to split a clip twice to edit.
• After that the kids went to work. We got half of them done and Chrissy finshed the other half later that day. Once the students started to get a hang of GarageBand that was it, they started helping each other and off they went. I showed the first person done how to export as an mp3 and then she showed the rest.

I took the mp3 files down to Pre-K and the kids loved them!

Chrissy will now also use the files in her class to talk about expression, voice, fluency, etc.

Two for the price of one!

Two fun lessons this week that reminded me why I love this stuff so much!

I’ve got two podcasts; On Deck and Gourmet Geeks that are syndicated via iTunes (here and here). I noticed that when you download them to your iPod that the Album Art wasn’t coming through so I did a little research.

I use PodPress on a WordPress install and thought (wrongly) that the Album Art for podcasts was picked up via the RSS feed like everything else in iTunes. But the Album Art actually comes from the ID3 tag on an mp3 file.

Confused? Yeah this is a bit geekie.

What is a ID3 Tag?

ID3 is a very popular audio file data tagging format in active use by
software and hardware developers around the world. ID3 tags are
supported in software such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, YME, MusicMatch and hardware players like the iPod, Creative Zen, Toshiba Gigabeat and Sony Walkman.

So I learned something new. Didn’t even know that this existed. So basically within a mp3 file you can store some date within the ID3 tag. One use for the tag is the Album Art.

So in order to get your Album Art to show up you need to have it embedded into the mp3 file. How do you do this?

You download a ID3 tag editor. I downloaded and installed AudioShell which works really well on my PC. It adds itself to the right-click preferences function. So you can right-click on a mp3 file and as the image shows to the left, add your album art right there into the ID3 tab.

I’m not sure how you add information to the ID3 tag on a Mac. But if someone could point me in the right direction in the comments I’d appreciate it.

When I got to school I looked up last years post Back from Digital Darkness and reflected on what I wrote last year and how my experience was different last year compared to this year. Last year I wasn’t looking forward to the week, supporting my wife’s efforts at school as the elementary counselor was the reason.

This year I found myself looking forward to the week. Having an excuse not to get on the computer was very appealing. There are days I’m tired of being tied to technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love this stuff, but sometimes I’m just tired. It must be what baseball players look forward too during the All Star break. Just some time to take a couple days and not think about all of it….not have to be at a specific place at a specific time, or thinking…always thinking.

What I was most excited about I think was doing things that I continually put off in favor of or felt like I “had to” do.

So what did I accomplish last week:

• I played the guitar until my fingers were numb…..twice
• I finished the book Feed
• I finished the auidobook Meatball Sundae
• About halfway through Here Comes Everybody
• About halfway through the audiobook Wisdom of Crowds

Also my wife and I went bowling for the first time ever together and had some great walks around Shanghai just thinking and reflecting.

Why was this year different? I think I’ve come to understand that I do not need to be connected all the time, that the network is really good at holding information for me. I don’t have to be constantly connected to learn, I have the skills to go back and find out what I need to know. My network filters the best parts of the past week for me. Be it Twitter, RSS reader, podcasts, etc. I allow my network to tell me what I missed, from there I make a decision on what is important enough for me to go back and learn (What’s the skill here we need to be teaching?).

There is nothing that happened last week that is not there for me this week to learn.

There is nothing that happened last week that I can not search and find out about.

What I have come to understand is the web waits for you. It will hold the information for you until you are ready to learn it, ready to use it. It waits, paticiantly, always on, always gathering, catergorizing and remembering. I can take a week off because the web doesn’t.

I encourage everyone to take some time off. It doesn’t have to bee a week but two or three days in a row is a great experiment. It was funny listening to the elementary students who I think had an easier time with Screen Free week then their parents did. Many adults compained that they “just couldn’t” and others only did it from Monday to Friday claming the weekend doesn’t count. Why? Are we really that reliant on TVs and Computers during the weekend? What did people do on weekends before TV and computers?

I was on the computer during work hours, but only used it for work tasks (production time was amazing last week!) No Twitter, no personal e-mail, no RSS reader, etc.

When I left school at 3:30pm that was it, I would find other things to take my time and let the screens be.

Like last year, the cell phone was the one screen device that was allowed in our house. What does that say about that technology (no I don’t have an iPhone…just a plain old Nokia)?

So back to being connected, a book of ideas to write about, 682 things to read in my RSS Reader, and more songs to download to play on the guitar.