Podcasting

I will admit I have never done a podcast myself, but I did find out about them quite a while ago.  The best part about podcasts, is that it gives people multiple avenues to be heard.  It is very similar to a blog in that nature, but allows people who may not be good at making spoken word into a good piece of literature.  My previous podcasting experiences have all been through the avenue of music.  Certain musicians use podcasts as a way to get some extremely rare music to fans, or to explain some of the visions and processes that go into making our favorite tunes.  I have also found a few of my friends check out "experts" podcasts for the fantasy football season. 

The resource I checked out was Yodio.  What I really liked about Yodio was the ability to sync your words to photos.  This is about as great as it could get for an educator who uses PowerPoint slides often.  You could basically use Yodio to publish lectures on an open source that everyone in your class could log in to.  This is great for students who may have questions of what is covered, or in extreme cases any students who may be sick for an extended periods of time.  The outside of the classroom benefits are more toward the social networking side.  Imagine being able to share vacation photos, or home improvement projects with friends and family where you can tell the story along with the pictures. 

Yodio only had one drawback I could find at that was not being able to record from your computer.  Their system works on you calling a server and recording straight from your phone.  This would not be much of a problem for homes with landlines, but I can only use my cell phone, which has a limited number of minutes.  I would say that the ability to record both ways would be highly beneficial.  However, I would imagine you could somehow cheat the phone system by using Skype to call. 

This podcasting tool is extremely easy to use, and has an amazing tutorial system that pops up as soon as you log into the page.  They also have a picture on the front page that spells out all the steps involved in creating your own podcast.  Once you have created your podcast and synced it to your photos, they also have a nice tool that lets you categorize what type of podcast it is.  The final step is using your own social network tools to embed your podcast into any website you may want it to post to. 

With all of the options out there for people to make podcasts with different tools, I would recommend Yodio for anyone who wants to, or needs to integrate photos.  Their system is as easy as it gets, and being able to add slides or photos to your words may give you greater flexibility than just the spoken word.