In completing this task, I struggled with a couple of issues which can be broadly grouped into (1) Content and (2) Technical.
(1) Content Issues
What should I talk about in my first podcast? There\’s so much to say and yet I am caught in this dilemma of what to say. For someone who has an opinion for just about anything, dumbfounded hardly describes me at all. My thoughts immediately went back to the classroom where students will be dumbfounded by this \”anything goes\” philosophy. Children love independence and freedom and yet they are lost when too much freedom is given to exercise \”free will\”. Huh… that\’s where the skillful teacher comes in- give some, hold some and drop some.
As I struggled, my mind floated back to my childhood days and slowly my story began.
(2) Technical Issues
Writing is the easy part, the technical glitches is part a whole nightmare. By an incredible silly mistake, I bought a microsoft headset with microphone- Live Chat 3000. That really sealed my fate- I had to work on my pc. Then, came the question- how do you do a recording on pc? A probe here and there, I discovered the existence of a sound recorder- rather basic in nature. On testing it with my Microsoft headset, lo and behold, no sound came out ! Panic bells rang and my job was abruptly halted. Desperately, I reached out for my logitech headset which I thought was damaged. Maybe, just maybe the mic will work. Yes! it did. What a relief it was.
And so the first recording was made. But wait…. the volume is rather soft. After a couple of attempts, the volume was raised but not significant. Time to try out on my Macbook Air. This little slim machine is neat but has one inline jack- which means you can listen but you cannot talk at the same time and vice versa. But the voice quality was much clearer and that was critical. So it was an exercise of jacking in and out for audio input and output.
Next came this thought of adding music to the podcast. The word \”Audacity\” came to mind as I remembered either Tim or Mike who mentioned it on April 2. After searching and double checking, the sourceforce.net webpage did not provide the necessary free download but rather their trial demos. That\’s no good at all. It\’s back to mac and garage band.
Garage band is a breeze which is so typical of all mac software. The people at Apple designed their environment and software with the user in mind. Coupled with the fact that it hardly hangs, that\’s a great plus for me. Everything was put together in a jiffy.
The next great lap was finding a host to upload the podcast. I tried a couple like podbean and Gcast; but they were very slow to upload and finally hung on me. Back to the search engine I went and found “mypodcast.com”. After signing up, it was a breeze uploading my first podcast. And I am told that there is no limited space for upload as well. How true? I have yet to find out.
All in all it has been a good experience. Do visit my first attempt at http://judithflex.mypodcast.com.
