The podcast saga continues...
W/O 1.1.07 - I found the bumper music and slide that was to be used for the introduction. The music is quite loud. Why, I wonder, can't I get my voiceover to be just as robust? So far my voice volume is soft and the music is loud. This can not be good. My
Help Me! list is growing.
The next hurdle - getting my PowerPoint slides to display in Garage Band. I received a suggestion from a team member that I use Keynote instead of PowerPoint, as Keynote and Garage Band are quite compatible. No problem, I’ll just take my PowerPoint slides and copy them into Keynote. Wrong! Okay, now I have to recreate my slides. Keynote is not a sophisticated presentation program and has just the bare minimum bells and whistles. (lots of muffled mumbling here). Most of my slides have to be recreated.
Whew! That done, I am ready to “slide” my slides into their proper place on the podcast band. Nope…no can do. Help! It seems you have to export them to I Photo, then slide them in. More steps. New problem – some of the slides are too big and the words are cut off. Now what? If only I could preview before exporting to I Photo. So this was the process for about 2 hours - delete the slides on the podcast band, edit the slides on keynote, export them to I Photo and finally slide them into position on the podcast band…oh…this was frustrating. If they still needed tweaking, the process started over again.
Finally, the slides are in place. One of my fabulous team mates suggested that I might want to include an art slide that will display at the end of the podcast. I created a very simple slide in bright green with the name of the Podcast. Ready for playback. I like this feature as I was able to nudge the slides to position them to display at the right moment. Every so often, for a split second I would see that green art slide while the podcast was on playback. I realized that I had to move everything on the podcast track tightly together. Any gap on that track would cause the art slide to appear. That was easy enough to solve.
I am ready to move to the next step - background music. So many choices - so little time to choose. After eliminating the type of music I was not interested in, I asked for help again and got
some valuable tips from two team mates. I enjoyed manipulating the volume of my music
selection (a jazzy number called
Park Bench). The lightbulb went on (okay so I’m a little slow here)…if I can manipulate the volume of the background music, why then can’t I manipulate the volume of my voice. Big smiles. Success!
Creating a podcast was difficult at best. I had a huge learning curve to overcome before I was willing to send them out to be published. I am very satisfied with both podcasts,
Theory of Change and
Logic Model. In fact, I like them so much, that I am going to use these podcasts as part of my content in the Program Development 201 Blackboard course I am designing. I believe they will be extremely helpful to those who might need an overview/review of these important elements of program planning.
You can find both
RSS feeds on the HRD website
www.browardschools.com/hrd . Look for them in the Podcast section under PD Providers.
I have been researching how podcasts are utilized outside of BCPS. My approach was to create and send surveys about iPod use to corporations that are familiar to me. As many of you know, I come from private industry and thought that it would be useful to know how podcasts are being used outside of an educational setting. I sent the survey along with a personal note to a few departments in several companies. I chose communications, training and development, marketing and IT.
The results were abysmal. I received very few answers and the ones I did receive were short with little or no useful information. I thought of starting again, but would there be enough time? As I look over my questions for my research, I realize that they are perfectly good questions. It was my method of research that was misdirected. So, back to the drawing board. I have collected quite a number of articles and a white paper about corporate podcasting. I am going to wade through the information to see if my questions can be answered or if I will need to change the direction of my questions.
