Making a Podcast has got to be one of the most uncomfortable tasks I have done thus far! Listening to myself ramble on about something (that I am passionate about) and then listening to it to again and again to edit, makes me very anxious. I am not going to lie, I had a pretty hard time using Garage Band on my iPad, and would have loved to have used Audacity but my computer has the worst mic ever! But sometimes struggling through something can turn into a pretty fun experience, and I decided to have fun finding and adding some free, Creative Commons friendly background sound. I was somewhat dismayed to not find a "fade-out or in" feature, so I played with the sound splicing feature and made different layers of audio. I definitely learned a lot about how to use the main Garage Band tools.
In the end, I actually think that doing a Podcast activity with my students would be an engaging process for them! I can really envision using it as part of a passion project or for doing book reviews with two person commentary like in the Robb Wolf Podcasts I enjoy listening to. My students tend to be much more skilled with the iPads than myself too, so I think that they would probably be more successful than me :)
I was pleased to discover how easy the finished product was extracted from Garage Band, and then either emailed or added to my Google Drive. It appears you can also Airdrop the finished product which would be an amazing way to collect the information. I would like to explore further to see if the files would be easily added to students FreshGrade e-portfolios.
Then came the final challenge, how to share the podcast with all of you... The filetype made with Garage Band is a m4a, which I have never heard of. The file could not simply be uploaded to my Wix blog. To share through Google Drive, the user would need to download a special Google Plugin, which I didn't want to force on anyone; and YouTube does not just let you upload audio files. So I researched what most people do, and discovered how to use my Windows Movie Maker to add an image with my audio file and then create a wmv movie file which is supported by YouTube. Thankfully YouTube is quite user friendly :) and I was then able to embed into the blog and get a shareable link for all of you. So I hope you enjoy my podcast about mountain biking in the North Okanagan. Note that the image is mine but not from the area I discuss in the podcast.
https://youtu.be/9McPhu-82C4
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