Running your own Podcasting Workshop can be a fun and exciting way of getting students, faculty, or just friends into creating content. Whether it is for a historical presentation, personal narrative, or journalism, the basics of podcasting are all the same. The main topics that you’ll want to hit are:
Recording Audio
Depending on your format you could be recording audio directly into your computer, but frequently one needs to capture audio in the field. Any audio recording device can work, but digital audio recorders are small, compact, and increasingly inexpensive. If you or your group will be doing a lot of interviewing a digital audio recorder might be a sound investment.
Capturing & Editing Audio with GarageBand or Audacity
There are many software tools for editing audio, we recommend GarageBand or Audacity as free products that are relatively powerful. Audacity has the advantage of being open source and available for both PCs and Macs.
Publishing and Posting
Most audio editing programs have a range of publishing options the trade quality for low file size. With spoken word podcasts you can usually publish at relatively low quality settings, but given the different materials might want to include in a podcast (such as music) you may wish to experiment with higher quality settings.
Real Simple Syndication (RSS)
One of the strengths of Podcasts are the ability to “subscribe” to them such that one’s computer downloads the lated episode automatically. This ability to subscribe is powered by RSS, a piece of technology one can also use to subscribe to blogs and news websites. To allow listeners to subscribe to a podcast it needs to be connected to an RSS feed, posting your podcasts via a blog is an easy way to set this up.