Using Wimba Podcaster
The Wimba suite of tools on the Blackboard site recently added a Podcasting utility that makes recording and creating a podcast very easy.
The first question most people have before using the Wimba Podcaster, or any other podcasting software, is, what exactly is podcasting? Podcasting is a way for you to publish text, and audio files to the internet in such a way that someone else's computer can automatically download them and, for example, place them automatically on their iPod. If you create the podcast, you are the publisher. You make episodes of it much like episodes of a radio show. The end user then subscribes to your podcast, and whenever you add a new episode, their computer automatically downloads it for them. A more in depth discussion of podcasting and its merits can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
For our purposes the podcast is specifically useful because of the ease with which it can be used by students. Most students have an MP3 player of some sort, and the vast majority of them use iTunes to play music on their computers. iTunes has podcasting functionality built into it, meaning that it can subscribe to, and download podcasts, and then automatically add them to a user's iPod. iTunes itself is a free download for any students who do not already have it, and can be found at http://www.itunes.com. The ramifications of this are that your students have to do very little to make use of a podcast should you decide to publish one for your class, meaning that the likelihood of them using it is high.
Note: The Wimba Podcaster has a number of drawbacks, namely, its limit of recording time to under 10 minutes, its limit of file size to less than 10MB, and its inability to handle video files. If you require any of this functionality, there is an alternative method of creating podcasts detailed here.
Instructions
To use the Wimba Podcasting utility, go to the Communications section of your Blackboard Course site:
Once there, click on Wimba Podcaster:
Your computer may give you a security warning, but you can trust this program, so accept the warning:
The Wimba Podcaster should then load:
Note: If the Wimba Podcaster doesn't load, you may not have Java installed on your computer. To install it, follow the instructions laid out in the video tutorial available here (File Currently Not Available).
Once the Wimba Podcaster has loaded it will be blank with no episodes available. When creating an episode of a podcast here, you have two options. The first is to record your own voice, which requires that you have a microphone attached to your computer. The second is to upload a sound file that you have acquired elsewhere. For example, you could upload a sound file of someone reading the news in a foreign language for a language class. In order to upload a separate sound file, click the Import button which will prompt you to find the file on your computer, and will then upload it into Blackboard. To record your own voice, click the Compose button. The following window will appear:
In the compose window, give your episode a subject, or title, and then if need be, type in a description. For language classes it can be useful to provide a written transcript of the audio you will be recording in the description. Finally, when you are ready to record your audio file, click the record button in the top left hand corner of the window. Each recording has a 20 minute limit to keep the file size reasonable. When you are finished recording, click the stop button. If you make a mistake whilst recording, feel free to stop recording and click the record button again, you will now replace your old recording with your new one. Unfortunately though, because this is a very simple system, you are not able to edit small parts of the recording. If you make a mistake, you will have to begin recording from the beginning again.
Once you are satisfied with your recording, click the submit button. Depending on the size of your sound recording and the speed of your internet connection, it may take a while for the file to be uploaded. Once it has been, the Compose window will disappear, and your episode will appear in the list of episodes available:
Clicking on the title of any of the episodes in the episodes list (here we only have one, but there could be many) will show that episode in the preview pane at the bottom of the window from where you will be able to listen to the audio and read the text:
Now, as noted earlier, the beauty of podcasts is their ability to be subscribed to by one's students. Wimba makes subscribing to a podcast very easy. Firstly, the student must make sure that iTunes is installed on their computer. It is likely that this is already the case for most students. Then, the student should navigate to the Wimba Podcaster just as you did by going to the Communications section of the Blackboard site and then clicking on Wimba Podcaster. When they view the podcast they won't have the ability to edit episodes or create new one, just to view and listen to them. To subscribe, all they have to do is click the 1-click iTunes subscription button in the top right hand corner of the window:
This will open iTunes on their computer, take them to the Podcast section, and subscribe to the podcast for them. It must be noted however that when you are creating the podcast and testing it you shouldn't worry it your episode doesn't show up in iTunes immediately. It usually takes between 5 and 10 minutes for the file you create to get onto the server and ready to use. Also, sometimes won't automatically take the student to the podcast section. However, if they navigate to the podcast section of iTunes themselves, they will see that iTunes has in fact subscribed them to the podcast:
The user may also need to adjust the podcast settings on their computer depending on the frequency of updates to the podcast. They can adjust when to check for new episodes, how many episodes to keep, and what to do when a new episode is detected (should it be downloaded automatically?) To adjust these settings, they should click on the Settings button in the bottom left hand side of the iTunes window:
This will open the settings dialog where they can make their choices. below are the default iTunes podcast settings, which should be sufficient for most users:
Overall, the Wimba Podcaster strives to make podcasting easy for both the creator and the user. Creating episodes can be done very painlessly, as long as the recording goes on without a hitch, and, as we've seen, subscribing to the podcast can be a 1 click experience.