BlogDale

The day was scorching hot and the rooms stifling, but the Music conference went down a storm. I did two sessions on the use of Audacity for podcasting, which I’ve blogged on the Shropshire HOS blog here, so ’nuff said. A number of people signed up for eThink blogs on the day, which is great - seeing the ways the use of this technology develops in schools is inspiring.

Worthy of comment is the Cool Timer which I used for the first time. It’s just an on-screen timer but projected up on the wall/screen/IWB it lets people know how long they have left for a task and adds to the mix in a lesson. It was great fun to change the alarm soundfiles around but the gentle harp one really didn’t hit the mark as an alarum. Mrs Brown uses it I hear, and I grinned as I thought of her getting pupils to choose their own soundfile for the alarm. I bet she does - just her style, getting the pupils to take a part in the running of the lesson.

Today I was asked by a colleague to define podcasting. On the spot, after some mental humming and hawing I narrowed it down to being simply a broadcast on the web, an audio file placed there for download. Further to this, I suggested it ought to have rss enclosures so that podcatcher aggregators (such as Juice and iTunes) know to download it as an episode.

Here’s how Juice defines a podcast:

Podcasts are audio broadcasts created and stored digitally on the Internet. Instead of being broadcast over the airwaves once and lost, like with traditional radio, podcasts were created to be stored and played at the user’s convenience. Think of them as radio shows waiting to be downloaded.

Wikipedia is a bit more fulsome:

Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio programs or music videos, over the Internet using either the RSS or Atom syndication formats, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The term podcast, like ‘radio‘, can mean both the content and the method of delivery. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. Podcasters’ web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their files; a podcast however is distinguished by its ability to be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading RSS or Atom feeds.

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Google have opened the door to Writely so that people can register once again. I regard this as a Good Thing since Writely brings easy access to collaborative documents, a valuable tool in educating youngsters to be part of a responsible online community.

Steve goes through the features of Writely here.  Additionally there is the facility to use Writely to post to a blog which might be an interesting use of this software.

I’ve tracked this back to Steve’s blog to show how trackbacks work.