Podcasting with ICS

ICS believes that podcasting will become an important teaching tool in the near future. We have set up a pilot podcasting server for faculty to use to experiment with this technology.

The purpose of the project is to provide an environment that makes it easy for instructors to publish their podcasts and easy for students to find them.

Click here to view podcasts on server.

What is podcasting?

Podcasting is the distribution of MP3 audio files. CITES Educational Technologies has an excellent article covering the history of podcasting and using podcasting in courses. See Getting Started with Podcasting.

Using the pilot ICS podcasting server

The ICS podcasting server uses blogging software to publish and distribute audio files. Because of the educational focus of the project, the ICS podcasting server is organized by course name, rather than author name. To get started, you must register your course so that we can provide you with space on the server.

You can, of course, register more than one of your courses. In addition, you can give other people access to your course. This is useful, for example, to allow TAs or guest lecturers to publish MP3 files to the course space.

Registering your course

You must have an ICS password to register your course. If you need to create your ICS password, see Your ICS Password.

To get started,

  1. Go to the Blojsom registration page.
  2. Enter you NetID and ICS password on the login screen (see Fig. 1).
    3. log in screen
    Fig. 1: Login screen.
  3. In the navigation bar, click on Request -> Add.
  4. On the next screen you will need to enter four pieces of information:
    • blog id - course number (ex. span101)
    • blog name - course name (ex. Spanish 101)
    • description - a short description of the courser (ex. Beginning Spanish)
    • department - department name (ex. Spanish)
  5. Click Submit.

Note: Registration is currently a manual process. ICS staff members check for registration requests daily and then create the spaces. You will not have immediate access to your course area. Please be patient.

Publishing and editing your audio files

Once the space for your course is created, you'll be able to add and edit your audio files.

To access your course space:

  1. Go to the Available Course Podcasts page.
  2. Next, you need to navigate to your course area. Click on the name of your department, followed by the title of your course.
  3. Once you are on your course page, click on the login link at the top of the page.
  4. Enter your NetID for your Username and your ICS password for your Password.
  5. Once you've successfully logged in, you will be taken to the Administration Console for your course. From this area you can add and edit content.

To add files:

  1. From the Administration Console, click Entries -> Add Entry.
  2. From the Add Blog Entry page, modify the following fields:
    • Blog entry title: Enter a short name for your podcast, such as the name of the guest speaker, the topic, or .
    • Blog entry text: Enter a description of the file you are uploading. Including information such as the topic, speaker, or lecture date may be helpful.
    • Blog entry publish date and time: Enter the date and time of your post in the specified format
    • File to upload: Click Browse, select your file, and then click Open.
    • RSS enclosure: When uploading an audio file, you must choose Select a file as an enclosure.
  3. Click the Add blog entry button to post your audio file.

To edit files:

  1. From the Administration Console, click Entries -> Edit Entries.
  2. From the Edit entries in an existing blog category drop down list, choose the name of category for which you would like to edit entries.
  3. Click the Edit entries in an existing blog category button.
  4. On the next screen you can choose to edit or delete any entry in the category.
    • To delete an entry, select the name of the entry from the Delete an entry from the [name of category] category and click the Delete blog entry button.
    • To edit an entry, select the name of the entry from the Edit an entry from the [name of category] category and click the Edit blog entry button. Make the changes to your entry and click the Update blog entry button.

To give other people administrative access

  1. From the Administration Console, click Weblog Settings -> Permissions.
    • To give another user access to the Administration Console of your blog, enter their NetID under Add a new permission for a user of the current blog and click Add permission.
    • To remove another user's permissions, enter their NetID under Delete a permission for a user of the current blog and click Delete permission.

Listening to audio files

The audio files on the podcast server are nothing more than mp3 files recorded by an instructor instead of a band. As long as your browser is capable of playing mp3 files, you can simply click on the filename and listen (right now!) with your browser. Alternatively, you could click on the file and select "save as" to save it to your hard drive and use your favorite mp3 program. This is fine for playing the occasional one-time podcast you want to check, but the real strength in podcasting is to subscribe to a course and automatically receive the podcast files as they are added to the server.

One popular way to listen to the audio files stored on this server is to download the files onto a portable MP3 player with iTunes. iTunes has the ability to subscribe to a podcast, automatically downloading new or updated podcasts to your computer. If you have an iPod, you can configure iTunes to also copy the new or updated podcast to it. This means you can have iTunes subscribe to any course on this server and have the audio materials delivered to your computer (and iPod if you have one) automatically.

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