Thing 30: DIY

I am choosing to use "Thing 30" for this assignment as a precursor for the next assignment "Thing 5." Hopefully that is okay. I reached out to our high potential (enrichment) teacher in hopes that he would be willing to work with me on having our students in his enrichment class submit a podcast for the NPR podcast challenge. He was eager to collaborate, but didn't know much about podcasting. I didn't know much either, but I had been dabbling with starting my own podcast so this challenge would not only be beneficial to the students, but to me as a professional. Little did I know how many tools would be involved in creating a podcast.

I decided to use Anchor for our podcast platform, which is a simple and super easy tool to use, which I will explain in detail for my next post. For this assignment, we took the first steps in the podcast creation and used Zoom to capture an audio recording of an interview students conducted with an expert from a remote location. Anchor does have a built in recorder, which we couldn't use because the person wasn't at the same location as us. Additionally, Anchor has an app for recording, but the other person would also need the Anchor app, so we needed to rely on a different recording tool. I had attended an amazing conference (Boston Innovation Summit) in the Fall and had learned about a conference recording tool called Zoom. I decided to experiment with this tool for capturing the recording of the interview. 

Zoom has a free version, which requires a slight learning curve. It makes for a great platform to host interviews because the students are actually able to see the person/ people that they are interviewing which  makes for a more natural conversation than if they were just hearing their voice. There are several screen layout options where the people involved can be displayed side-by-side or the person speaking can be displayed on the large screen and the people listening can be displayed in thumbnails on the side. You also have the option to pause the conversation at anytime, which is a great feature if you want to record in segments and then set the stage for the next part of the recording. When the recording is finished it will automatically save to the computer you are on. It will save it as a mp4 and an M4a file so that you have a video and audio file of the recording.  This can the be uploaded to Anchor. Once it is in Anchor it can be spliced. 

When setting up a conference call on Zoom you will have to select "My Meetings" from the side toolbar and then schedule a meeting.

Once you have selected "Schedule a Meeting" you are provided with several choices for criteria of the meeting. You can set time, duration, video & audio options and requirements for joining, participating and saving the meeting. Under the audio options you can choose if you want the video and the audio saved separately. You will want to select that you want both the video and audio saved. Although you do not necessarily need the video file, I choose to save it in case the audio doesn't work, I can transfer the mp4 to an mp3.  Probably not necessary, but I would rather be safe than sorry. 

Once the meeting is set up you can email the link to the attendees and they can open it to join the meeting. Once in the meeting the interface takes a little getting to used to, but once you learn to navigate the screen and options, it is SUPER simple. As mentioned earlier there is a start/pause recording option that you get to control as the host. There is even a chat option on the side. Once you hit end meeting it automatically saves to your computer (assuming you chose that option when setting up the meeting). Then you can upload your audio file to Anchor to use in your podcast. 

I would love to attach the sample of the students audio recording work from their conference call, but Blogger doesn't have the option to upload audio. Stay tuned for my next assignment, "Thing 5", where they will add their recording to Anchor and building their entire podcast.