Podcasting guidance needed

I am having my students create a posters depicting topics in the Civil Rights movement. We will be hanging them in the hallway and creating a Civil Rights Poster Gallery. I would like to have my students record themselves explaining their topics in a podcast. That way I can display the posters in the hallway, and other students would be able to listen to their classmate's explanations on their MP3 players.

My challenges are these:

1. I need a recommendation for a podcasting host

2. I would like to record one podcast with multiple tracks so that I can label each poster with a track number (poster one corresponds to track one in the podcast.) I subscribe to a few DJ podcasts and each new song in a mix is a new track so I know this is possible. How do I do this? I have Audacity and garageband at my disposal.

thanks - my kids are super excited - I appreciate any help you can give me.

mrg

Tags: podcasting

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Permalink Reply by Dorethia(Dotty) Myers on May 20, 2010 at 9:30pm

If you are using a MAC you can use Garageband to make a podcast.

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Permalink Reply by Janine on July 14, 2010 at 8:32pm

Very interesting idea! I'm facing some of the same issues as you right now. I'm starting podcasting this year and wasn't sure where to host them. An excellent and knowledgable source recommended www.podomatic.com for hosting. You can also record on the site as well. I don't know if you can set up multiple tracks on one podcast, but it's worth a try. I've already set up my URL but have not done much else. Let me know if it works for you!

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Permalink Reply by Steve Grigalunas on July 17, 2010 at 10:14am

Update:

So I managed to pull it off. I started out trying to record them all on my laptop using Garage Band. Recording everyone was not getting the job done fast enough. We ended up using the audio recorder software that used to come with Windows XP (under accessories.) It limited each recording to a minute but worked for my purposes. The files were in .wav format and were of a manageable enough size that they could e-mail their sound files to me. I used Audacity to convert them to mp3s and posted them to my hosting site.

I never did figure out how to make multiple tracks in the same episode so I ended up recording each poster's narration as its own file.

I ended up using drop.io as my hosting site. It doesn't give you a lot of space (might not work for video podcasts) but is super easy to use. You set up an account which gives you a unique URL, upload your files and make sure they are set to share and that's pretty much it. Visitors go to your account, click on "share" and then click on "dropcast." This automatically subscribes them to your drop.io using iTunes.

The audio files for my projects are here: http://drop.io/mrgtechnology

and here are some example posters: