iPad Apps: Using Mobile Podcaster to podcast to PrimaryBlogger

mobilepodcasterWhy Podcast?

Over the next few weeks I am going to be working with groups of primary school pupils to try and improve their speaking and listening skills. One way of helping with this is to record them and play back the recordings so that they can hear and analyse themselves.

There are lots of podcasting solutions available for the iPad but I wanted to find a simple way of recording pupils using an iPad, reviewing / re-recording them and then publishing straight onto a PrimaryBlogger site based on WordPress. One of the more popular ways of doing this is with Audioboo and I will look at this in another posting.

There are a couple of things you need before you start:

  • a WordPress blog (we use Primaryblogger)
  • your blog administrator needs to enable the Blubrry PowerPress plugin (thanks to Ed at PrimaryBlogger who made this available) and preferably configure it to display the audio player correctly
  • Mobile Podcaster installed onto your iPad (£1.99 from the app store)
  • I would also suggest that you create a separate user for publishing podcasts to the blog and that this user is set as a Contributor so that you can moderate blogs before they are published
  • You can also create a Podcast category and set the app to automatically post into this category.

Mobile Podcaster is very easy to use, you can view a video on how to use it to publish a podcast, optional text and picture straight to you class blog.

Limitations of this method:

  • you cannot edit the recording before publishing – it would be nice to be able to trim the beginning and end if necessary
  • the sound files are stored on the WordPress site so you may soon run out of space and have to upgrade
  • you are currently limited to 15 minutes recording (not that this will be a problem for the work we are currently doing!)

I will add some links to some of our podcasts shortly.