Monday, November 8, 2010

Using blogger to share a podcast

Last week we looked at how you and your students could create a podcast using the free online audio editing tool, Audacity. This week we'll look at how to share that audio.

Here is a suggested method:
  1. Enable enclosures in your blog (Dashboard > Settings > Formatting > Show link fields > 'Yes'
  2. Upload your mp3 file to a file sharing service (e.g. Dropbox or Box.net)
  3. Find and copy the link to your file
  4. Create a new post in your blog
  5. Underneath the title select 'Add enclosure link' and paste in the url for the file
  6. Embed a player in your post as well (see below)
Most of these steps are summed up in the Blogger help video below:


The video covers steps 1-5 above, but does not show you how to embed a player in your blogpost. One way of doing that is described at the Unofficial Google Operating System blog.

If you copy the code provided in this post, and replace [MP3_file] with the url of your mp3 file, then a flash player will appear in your post, allowing your readers to listen to the audio from within your post, as well as using iTunes or other RSS readers. The player will look like this (image only):




From what I understand, the player can only play mp3 files, which is a bit limiting. Obviously, this is just one way of going about sharing a podcast, if you have other suggestions please let me know by leaving a comment.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

interesting tool, but again, its time consuming...

Christoph said...

Thanks for the comment. Yes, I was surprised how long this took us all and so we lost a lot of class time. As much as possible, it's probably a good idea to set tasks like this as homework, but in all likelihood one would still need to set aside some time for troubleshooting in class. One thing that you can count on when teaching with technology is that it is going to need a lot of time, usually a lot more than you would think!