My holiday tech project has involved the creation of a podcast. I have been working on a project concept I describe as “Sharing Something Local”. The idea is to teach others about something “locals” may understand, but those outside your group or area may not. My first example involved the sugar beet harvest in North Dakota. I have had a second example in mind and finally found time to put it together. Our daughter worked in Ketchikan, AK, this summer and we had the opportunity to visit her. While not exactly local, the podcast reflects something we experienced. The actual podcast will appear on our Participatory Web site. We work with tools and ideas we expect to fit a middle school curriculum, but both the sophistication of the content and the production could be adjusted up or down.
Garageband makes the creation of podcasts relatively easy. This example required some extra work because it incorporates both still images and videos. Garageband appears to allow one or the other. I first generated the multimedia core in iMovie and then brought this into Garageband to add the Intro and Outro and to export. What appears below is a Quicktime movie in m4V format. I am not certain if it plays on all platforms, but it requires less bandwidth than a .mov file.
