Podcasting Presentation

I created a podcast for a training I did in the Laptop Lounge last week.  I thought it would be good to show how to subscribe to podcasts while at the same time covering some of the basic background information on podcasting.  The podcast feed is available here.

I created a short welcome video as the first episode in this podcast.  I think it would be good if professors would do this for their online classes.  I really like being able to put a face on the name I see over and over in Blackboard.  It makes the online class experience a little more personal and takes very little time to create.  I shot mine with the built-in iSight camera on my work iMac computer.   All Mac laptops sold now come with this built in camera.

Simile timeline tool

Simile is a project from MIT for creating AJAX timelines. The site has several examples of the possibilities for this tool, but I am not sure that creating a new timeline is simple enough for teachers to use. It would be great if the developers created an interface for entering events in a new timeline. Then this tool would be very useful for social study teachers.

Now if you know some XML (and who doesn’t these days ) and also some basic JavaScript, then this may be something you can start working with soon.

Podcast subscribe button

Here’s how you create a one-click subscribe button for your podcast on your website:

1. Visit this website and right-click on one of the logos and download it to your desktop or some other location on your computer.
2. Insert the picture into your web page where you want to place the one-click subscribe button.
3. Open up the listing for your podcast in iTunes (you must submit your podcast first for this to work), right-click on the title, and select “Copy iTunes URL”.
4. Make your image into a link and use the iTunes URL as the link address.

By having these one-click subscribe buttons, you make it easier for your website visitors to subscribe to your podcast.

Another way to create enhanced podcasts online

Veotagging is yet another service that allows you to create enhanced podcasts online.  Veotagging works with video files and allows you to create a table of contents for a videos you upload to the site.  I wonder if anyone has done research on whether including chapter markers enhances retention from podcasts.  Something I will have to look into…

Create enhanced podcasts online

Divicast allows you to upload an audio file for your podcast and then it allows you to add chapter markers and images to go along with the chapters…all online, and with a very nice interface. I also believe it allows you to use any MP3 file…so finally, a quick way to create enhanced podcasts for Windows users..Of course, your podcast will have to be hosted at this site.

It’s so del.icio.us

So what is del.icio.us, you ask…It’s a social bookmarking website, in other words a way to store your bookmarks online so you can access them from any computer. There are other sites that do the same thing, such as Furl, Backflip, and Ma.gnolia. But for me, del.icio.us has proven to be the most useful. Like Google, del.icio.us sports a very clean, useful interface that doesn’t get in the way of what the site is supposed to do, save bookmarks.

The best thing about social bookmarking are the tags. Tags allow you to organize your bookmark collection. You can even view your bookmark collection in del.icio.us as a cloud, which shows how many bookmarks you have saved with each tag by the relative weight of the tag text. (By the way, since del.icio.us has a public API, many people have created websites that build on del.icio.us and allow you to do even more with your online bookmarks. To see an exhaustive list of del.icio.us tools, click on this link).

Another big reason I like and use del.icio.us so much is the browser buttons, which allow me to tag any web page I visit quickly and efficiently. Like many social websites, del.icio.us supports RSS so that you can subscribe to the bookmaks of a particular user or even a specific tag (I subscribe to the apple tag to get the latest info on anything Apple). You can also subscribe to another user’s collection as well, or use the for: tag followed by the user name of a person you want to share a bookmark with. Those bookmarks will show up in a links for you page on del.icio.us. To learn more about del.icio.us, you can read this website and download the guide.

There are many ways for students to use del.icio.us.  It can be used by individual students to organize their online research for papers and other projects.  Another possibility is to set up a class account and use it to allow students to create an annotated list of resource websites over the course of a semester.

gDisk

I love all things Google and I have used the GMail Drive extension to transfer files on the Windows side. Now, I can use gDisk to do the same on the Mac. Forgot your thumb drive?..No problem. Use gDisk to put the close to 3 GB of space on your GMail to use. Your files will appear as file attachments in GMail.

CoverFlow

Not necessarily an essential application, but one that is pretty cool: CoverFlow allows you to browse your iTunes artwork in a really cool way (download it here).  I like that you can right-click on an album that does not have cover art and then search for it on Amazon.  Then it’s as easy as dragging the image from the Amazon search into the CoverFlow window, and that’s it…you have added cover art to CoverFlow.  It would be really nice if this program would add the cover art to iTunes as well…maybe it will be added in a future version.

Update: The cover art feature is part of the new iTunes released this week. Apparently, Apple has bought Cover Flow from the company that created it. It is supposed to automatically download cover art, but when I tried it it had a hard time finding most of my music. I guess it depends on how you have your music labeled. In order to use the automatic download feature, you need to have an Apple ID, which is free.

Customizing Netvibes

I found out a couple of cool ways to customize Netvibes so that it’s even more useful.

• Change the tabs so that they include an icon:  this makes it easier to find what you need when you have a lot of tabs like I do.  To change the icon, click on the down arrrow next to the tab name, and then select an icon from the list.  You can even provide a URL to an image to use it as an icon.
• Visit Netvibes Ecosystem and browse through the many modules, RSS feeds, Calendar Events, and more they have available.  You can add content to Netvibes from this page by clicking on a button.  I added daily comics, as well as a Google maps module.  Now I can search Google Maps right from Netvibes.