My First podcast for H808 and ever

Here is my podcast. Yes it took me time but my aim was to be able to understand and use once this GarageBand program. I tried many others and did many tries. This is my first definitive reflexive-podcast about making this podcast. We could say a construcivist-podcast. I have added slides to it, so for a better experience, open this podcast in iTumes, QuickTime or play it on an iPhone or iPod device. If you listen to it, tell me what you think. Here is the transcript of this podcast Hello I am Dominique-Alain JAN, a student in the H808 Open University course called "The elearning professional". For the purpose of activity 8-11, I am delivering this podcast about: “elearning professionals and podcasting”. First, I will just reflect on my own experience of creating this, my first podcast ever. Then I will talk a bit about podcasting as an activity for elearning professionals. To begin with, I made some recording trials with Quicktime Pro and Audacity but I was rapidly disappointed by the poor quality of my output and I was puzzled by the complexity of editing the work. My first strategy was to re-record my text again and again, every time I made a mistake in reading, trying to improve the speech. Later I tried another strategy: never stopping the recording and editing the work to correct, delete or copy paste the different parts to create the final podcast. This task was full of learning, but took me ages and the final product was not any better according to my personal standards. I then decided to go a bit further into podcasting by finding information about how professionals were doing it. I found some information on the Apple Web site about using their GarageBand software solution for creating and delivering podcasts on Macintosh. I also subscribed to Lynda.com for a course on "Creating podcasts with GarageBand 3.0" which is an outdated version, but concepts in the course are still valid. I chose to create this podcast with GarageBand and used some of the program's key features which allow you to include "slides", "jingles" and "URLs" in the podcast. So if you are listening to this on iTunes or an iPhone or iPod, you should get more information than just my "funny french accent" talking to you. Now I come to the point about where, why or when podcasts could be useful. Listening to my previous attempts and to different podcasts over the web, I think that an mp3 file of a few minutes is not very useful and sometimes boring. Except maybe if those are recordings of broadcast radio programmes or interviews, where the context makes us ready to just listen to them. For education I believe that videocasts or podcasts with embedded media are more useful and will generate more interest and engagement from our students. This raises the problem of how could we create such material. Looking at a course about screencasting, lighting, microphones, mix-tables and all such professional equipment seem to be indispensable to deliver quality material to students and learner. As an elearning professional, could we afford that? Even if we could, do we have sufficient talent to do it? Is our voice, our expression or delivery good enough to be listened to for minutes at a time? Maybe, maybe not. I personally don't have talent for that, furthermore not in English. I think that the true talent of an elearning professional is to know about technology, to know about what is feasible and what is not. What does it cost in terms of time, money, people to create engaging learning material. To create them there are professionals in every art: our skill is to make them work all together.