I’ve done very little student podcasting but they both have the virtue of being short ;-)
http://pc30s.blogspot.com/2006/01/message-in-podcast.html
http://pc20s.blogspot.com/2006/01/message-in-podcast.html

I also did a brief podcast about commenting on student blog work. The audio goes hand-in-hand with reading the page I’m discussing in the podcast.
http://adifference.blogspot.com/2006/02/artful-comment.html

An audacity demo might also be a good hook. Have you seen this screencast?
http://connect.educause.edu/blog/mpasiewicz/audacity_screencast_test/834

I hope this helps. I’m looking forward to reading/listening to what you put together. I always learn something from you. ;-)

Good luck with the podshop!

Also, my students used it to record their first run of podcasts and I am going to talk with them next month is SF … here are my students’ posts:

http://blogs.3c.ist.psu.edu/camplese/?p=30

I like it and they have big ideas for where it is going.

Done anything in Odeo? Interesting tools (its own recording tool is limited to 3 minutes, but darn easy to use. It has Big Dumb Buttons ;-)

http://cogdogblog.com/2006/02/22/odeo-duh/

Here is something that I find interesting … I don’t want to give it all away, but I just got a few numbers from an electronic poll I just did in my class — interesting stuff related to podcasting … this is all out of only 24 responses:

-5 have subscribed to the class RSS feed
-16 have listened to the podcasts
-half own MP3 players (only 8 ipods)
-del.icio.us has been the most interesting web 2.0 tool explored
-Funniest quote of “why I listen to podcasts” … “I listen to hear myself”

Not sure any of that is helpful, but I found it very interesting … given that is over half of my class reporting. I would have bet only a handful would have listened. Hmm …

So part of this is tools and part is changing practice and much is just change management, and plus ca change, plus ca meme chose (th elimits of my high school French) and it is nearly all uphill as you well know.

I am ready to make some public blog statements about Apple’s walled strategies and veil of vagueness. I have writen before, but desipte how much I love Apple products, in trying to understand them I get confused betwen Cupertino and Redmond. Apple mystique may wear thin in this blog crazy world.

They should clean with their decisions to insert and remove features witout notice. I’m ready to lock and load since I have noithing to lose.

I have been talking about this on our campus for several weeks now … great lectures make bad podcasts and bad lectures make decent podcasts. I teach for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week and I record it make it available as a podcast from my class blog. My podcasts usually add up to about 30 minutes … I record all 1:15, but by the time you take out the part where students actually talk (you know, the good stuff) its much shorter. The point and click solutions do not account for that. I use GarageBand and it does a great job, but it adds a good 1.5-2 hours to my week through the editing process. In the past, the promise (albeit false) was that teaching with technology was a time saver. With the state of producing a decent podcast, it has increased it. Other than the handful of faculty here who care about an alternative delivery model that is asking way too much. You are not wrong to hope for more creativity, but applying it just to podcasting can’t be the answer … that is a much more systemic change.

I would never say the faculty here are simpletons — they are quite literally some of the smartest people around, but they are not technologists … they are world-class researchers and scientists. My goal is to break down every barrier to make the experience as invisible as possible, provide remarkable results, and make them think about their student’s experiences. This is a conversation that has been going on for quite some time — well before podcasting — but it seems to grow new legs every time we find the next big thing in the teaching and learning with technology space. One thing is for certain, we will back here again talking about whatever is next … I’m sure many of your readers are already onto what is “next.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not into dumbing down our approaches — on the contrary I want to make them more intelligent, more elegant, and more approachable. For now I’ll continue to do my thing if you promise to continue to do yours and maybe at the end of the day we (our community) will continue to encourage, persuade, educate, and inspire teachers to adopt new and innovative ways to engage their learners. In the meantime I need to send some mail to Apple about my ratings with podcasts. Thoughts?

Maybe I am an unreaslitic dreamer, but I wish for a higher level of creativity.

And I am horrified by your mention that Apple took away the 5 star ratings scale. Your implementation of that was something I raved about in terms of creatively exploting an existing technology to go far beyond what its designers had intended. What is with THAT Apple? iTunes ratings are purely gor personal use, so why would ti be taken away. Don’t you have any pull inside the ADCE?

Wow, gotta watch out for the worms inside the bright shiny apples.

GarageBand while very powerful is way too much for the typical classroom faculty member to do well. Audacity and Audio Hijack Pro are great, but we really need point, clip on mic, click, record, publish easy. If we can get to that we are golden. Right now it seems that even Apple is ignoring the whole simple creation/publish model — iTunes U makes the assumption that you already have a file created. Where is the easy model?

That’s my killer application question. And oh, by the way, Apple took away ratings on podcasts, so the ability to easily grade podcasts via the clickwheel is a thing of the past. *sigh* One step forward, two steps back. Sorry for the rambling.

But if it helps, my first workshop is here, and you are welcome to anything that might be useful: http://wiki.elearning.ubc.ca/PodcastWorkshop

I will say that teaching Audacity in a short period of time is tricky, but people seemed to like it. If people grasp what the waveform is, how the multitracks can be set up, and few basic commands like cutting and fading, some of them get excited pretty quick. Then again, you are doing a demo, not a hands-on.