Freshmancomp.com » Web2.0

Podcasting By Phone with Gabcast & iPadio

soul4real — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:17:37 +0000

I posted this on my podcasting blog almost 3 years ago. I’m doing a presentation tomorrow on enhancing courses with audio and thought I would revisit gabcast and take a look at iPadio. Check it out.

I attended the TechEd ‘07 conference in Ontario last week and podcasting was all the rage. Most sessions were standing room only. I tried to squeeze in as many as I could get into in the three days I was there just so I could learn something new. Most of the presentation were good, but there wasn’t much new information offered up for the experienced podcaster. I was lucky enough however to wander into a presentation on the last day that introduced me to a great podcasting tool: Gabcast. The website below does a great job of describing Gabcast:

Gabcast Podcasting By Phone Or VoIP – VoIP Sol

If you’ve caught the bug for podcasting and can produce enough chatter to publish your own audio content online, Gabcast will host your files for you for free. Once you post audio content either using a regular phone or a VoIP service, you can access the audio files from your website or weblog (Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, and more). The Gabcast service can also be used to host conference calls (VoIP Sol).

I can think of many ways to use this service. The presenter set up a podcast for the attendees to call in and leave feedback from the presentation. She had one of us call in during the presentation to demonstrate how easy it is use. The called showed up immediately on her site. Example below:

iPadio is a similar service, but includes an app you can use on the iPhone and Android phones as well. Here is what it looks like.

Multimedia Infused Freshman Comp

soul4real — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:07:21 +0000

Multimedia Infused Freshman Comp

From: soul4real

Multimedia Infused Freshman Comp

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: multimedia tyca-west)

Presentation for the TYCA-West conference in Clarkdale, AZ. Using podcasting in freshman composition courses.

SlideShare Link

Tips for Students Using Utterli

soul4real — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:34:25 +0000

I was fascinated with Utterli the moment I saw it. I just thought it was coolest thing to be able to send text, pictures, audio and video from your cellphone to a blog on the web. It’s a true example of mobile blogging. But what was most exciting to me was the way it lets people add multi-media to blog posts and invites a conversation or discussion around it. I have many ideas for how I want to use this in my classes, but for now I’m using it as a way to leave some valuable tips for students to help them be successful in my classes.

Students are Loving the Network

soul4real — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:40:47 +0000

I’m trying out a social network in my ENG101 and ENG102 courses this spring. I’m trying to make English fun, but there are also some very useful features built into the Ning social network. So far I’m loving just about everything but the adds. I’m not ready to fork over cash to get rid of them, but if I can make a compelling enough argument, make my division chair might consider picking up the tab. We’ll see.

One thing that is really neat is that the students just naturally pick up on the fun things there are to do in there. I instructed that there were only two required parts: discussion forum and personal blog posts. Everything else they do is just for fun and up to you if you want to participate. Well, it didn’t take long for them to fill up the site slide show. It’s neat to see all their faces and their families too!
Find more photos like this on Freshman Comp

I’ve been using it to post my weekly podcasts too. It has an embeddable player that I can add mp3s to. I can either upload to the site or upload via a web link. I like to upload my content on my own servers and then link to it. This will save me later with having to deal with bandwidth and file size. Here’s our podcast player from the network.

Find more music like this on Freshman Comp

In case you’re wondering, most of the content in our class network is private, so content that students create for the class and a grade is private – only members can see it. But adding photos and videos is optional, not class related, and acknowledged that it will be public because it shows up on the front page. I could make the whole site including the front page private, but then my announcements won’t have a RSS feed and I won’t be able to subscribe and feed them into Blackboard or offer email subscriptions. So I leave the front page public, and protect the rest.

I’ll post more about this experiment as we play with it more. So far we’re all loving it.

Using del.icio.us for Research in ENG102 Course

soul4real — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:46:54 +0000

Yes, just this semester I tried implementing del.icio.us into my ENG102 (research) class to help students share their research with each other. I wouldn’t say it was a huge success, but I still believe it is a worthwhile assignment. The main problem was that many students are not familiar with social bookmarking and can’t see a need for it. Students tend to “live for the moment” meaning they search for something in Google, find what they need, use it for whatever purpose, and then they are on to something else. It’s hard to get them to think in terms of “saving” for later or even sharing it with someone else. I also had to teach students how to download the bookmark extensions for the browsers in class and how to use the extension. This is all time consuming.

The assignment was based around a unit theme for the course, personal freedoms. This was an exploration assignment to get ideas for topics that fit into the theme. We used the notes section to practice summary skills. They wrote 3-5 sentence summaries of what the web pages covered, and we used the tags section to come up with keywords related to the topics. They could later use those same keywords to do further searches for periodicals and books. A requirement was that one tag must be: personal+freedoms. By using this tag we created a repository of web pages on the topic of personal freedoms, which then becomes a starting point for students exploring a topic to research and argue. Here is a list of our collection: http://del.icio.us/tag/%22personal%2Bfreedoms%22
We needed to spend more time on the tagging and keywords. They did do very well there.

I then used the RSS feed to port the collection into Blackboard, explaining to students that they could view the collection right from there, and whenever anyone added more to it, it would automatically repopulate with all the new content.

The evaluation part came in later. We were only concerned with gathering and sharing ideas with that assignment. The next assignment was to choose a page from the collection and evaluate it. The lecture discussed how web sources are not always reliable and are not always the best for college papers. My guess was that many of the pages collected would not be great sources, so an evaluation would point out some major flaws. They were then asked to search and share again, armed with this new knowledge, but I’m not so sure the second batch of pages collected were any better than the first.

I hope that explains it. If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask. I’m already think of better ways to do it next time.