1. Podcasting in the Classroom Presented by: Jason Arruzza, AIS

2. What is Podcasting?  a digital audio file (usually MP3 or AAC) made available for download on the internet through an RSS 2.0 feed.  The web address of the media file is contained in the enclosure tag of an item in the XML file.  A podcast's RSS feed is updated each time a new media file is published.  An aggregator for podcasts (such as iTunes or iPodder) is used to subscribe to the RSS feed.

3. Who can podcast?  anyone can create their own “radio”-style show and broadcast it to the world in very little time and at very little cost.  required: a computer, a mic and the internet.

4. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

5. What is Audacity?  Audacity is a rapidly evolving multi-platform soundfile editor that is freely available  Audacity 1.2.3 includes:  a good set of editing tools,  support for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API ( LADSPA) effects,  multitrack recording capability.  Its user interface is well-designed, uncluttered and simple to navigate.  Supported file formats include WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, and MP3; Audacity also exports to OGG format.  Standard cut/copy/paste operations are supported as well as Undo/Redo functions.

6. Resources  Audacity homepage/download  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ http://audacity.sourceforge.net/  Audacity Help, FAQ, etc  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation  Audacity Tutorials  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/tutorials  Audacity wiki  http://audacityteam.org/wiki/ http://audacityteam.org/wiki/  Audacity User Manual  http://audacity.sourceforge.net/audacity-manual-1.2.zip http://audacity.sourceforge.net/audacity-manual-1.2.zip

8. About sound files  The most popular and most common cross-platform uncompressed audio file formats are.AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format - Mac) and.WAV (Microsoft Windows Wave).  both support 16-bit, 44 KHz stereo and polyphonic sound (sound with more than two channels).  this quality is approximately 10MB per minute in size since it is high quality).  audio file formats include u-law, which use the suffix.au and so are often called AU files  MPEG audio (suffix.mpeg and.mpg). MPEG files are compressed (ie: ~ 1/5 the size of a.wav or.aiff file) but with a slight loss of quality.  When creating a sound file can set preferences to adjust the quality of the file by adjusting Bit Rate, Channel and Sample Width  basically choosing a mono channel together with the lowest sample width and the lowest sample rate you will create a lower quality, smaller file.  Ogg is an advanced binary audio format similar to the mp3 format. It is patent and royalty free, and is supported on most platforms.

9. Bit Rate  is the frequency at which bits are passing a given "point".  quantified using the bit per second (bit/s) unit.  bit rate measures number of bits/time  4 kbit/s – minimum necessary for recognizable speech  8 kbit/s – telephone quality  32 kbit/s – MW quality  96 kbit/s – FM quality  128 kbit/s – CD quality Source: Wikipedia

10. Audacity Activity:  Import a sound/music file into a track  Record a new voice track over  Edit as necessary  Add effects  Save as.mp3 file

11. Contact Details Jason Arruzza Education Consultant – ICT Across the Curriculum Level 4, 99 York Street, Sydney NSW 2000 Phone (02) 9299 2845 Fax (02) 9290 2274 Web aisnsw.edu.au Email jarruzza@aisnsw.edu.au ABN 96 003 509 073