The key to sticking with coursecasting is making it simple.  Your techie urges may keep you going for a while, but to continue semester after semester you want it to be easy.  Quick setup and no post presentation editing.  You may be fortunate to work at a school with IT support for coursecasting, but I don’t.  The apps and services I’ll describe below require no help from your IT department.

OK – you’re excited.  But what do you need?  

• The only thing you will have to buy is an application called Profcast.  This is Mac only software at the moment, although the developers promise a Windows version soon (yet another reason to switch).  The current cost is $60 ($30 academic pricing).  If you are using Windows there are other software solutions.  Either way, get your department to pay for it.
• Presentation software – ProfCast supports either PowerPoint or Keynote.
• A microphone that provides audio input to the computer playing your presentation- I use the internal mic on my Mac laptop and the sound is fine.  The downside is that when you walk away from the laptop your voice level drops, but the laptop mic does pick up student voices when they comment or ask questions.  You can use a wireless lapel mic, but then you cannot record students in the class.

With this simple setup you can record a podcast in any room that has a digital projector.  Your studio moves with you.  To record your lecture or talk you simply open profcast and drag your presentation into this window:

ProfCast will open your presentation and when you are ready to start you click the record button.  The software will record your voice in synch with each slide.  When have finished your talk, you click the share button and ProfCast turns the recording into a .m4a or .m4b enhanced podcast file – this means that chapter headings are inserted so that students can easily advance to any slide in your talk and listen to that specific part of the lecture/talk.  Your talk will look like this when viewed in iTunes:

Recording the presentation is that easy!  The trickiest part is actually distributing your recordings to students.  You can link each one to a webpage or distribute them using classroom support software like Blackboard or Angel.  If your University has an iTunes U setup you can use that.  I have played with a few solutions but am now using the following:

1. Upload your podcast episodes (the individual lectures) to an internet server.  This can be on your University servers or using your own personal web host.  I started using Bluehost (which also hosts this blog) because I could not access my University servers from off campus.  ProfCast makes this process easy by providing a built in podcast publisher.  This part of the software will add each new episode to your podcast and then upload them to your server space.  ProfCast will also write the RSS file (the most technical part of this process).  The RSS file tells podcatching applications, like iTunes, when you have published a new episode (lecture) so that it will be downloaded automatically.  This brings us to the last part of the process.  How do students subscribe to or download your podcast:
2. Set up a Feedburner feed for your course.  You bloggers reading this may already know what that means.  For the rest of you, Feedburner is a free service that makes it easy for others to subscribe to your podcast using programs like iTunes.  This is the application that my students almost always use to get my podcasts.  Once you sign up for a free Feedburner account and tell the website where your RSS file and podcast episodes live, you just need to give your students the feedburner URL for your podcast.  For example, my anatomy and physiology course is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/anatomy.  When students go to that address they see:

The beauty of using Feedburner is that you do not need to maintain a website for your podcast, Feedburner does that for you.  Students can then either subscribe to your podcast so that iTunes will download the episodes for them when they are posted, or they can download each individually.  Feedburner will also keep stats on how many people subscribe or access your podcast.

On last bit of advice – start slow.  I found that it took several weeks to get this system working smoothly.  Pick one course and consider it an experiment.  Let students know that you are trying this out for the first time and ask for feedback along the way.  This way if things do not work students will not be relying too heavily on the podcast and will not get upset when they do not appear.  I still have the occasional technical glitch that kills an episode (usually once a semester I forget to hit the record button at the beginning).

I receive very positive feedback from students about my podcasts during course evaluations and when talking to them about the course.  I would highly recommend that you give this a try.

If you are already podcasting your courses please let me know in the comments section what software/techniques you use.  I’d also like to know about any interesting teaching uses you have found for podcasting.  I plan to post about that in the future.

The best feature I have found is how easy it is to search the literature using a variety of search engines, like PubMed and Google Scholar.  There are a bunch of other discipline specific search engines as well.  As you browse your papers it is easy to do a quick keyword search for new articles.  You can easily save your searches, and have them automatically update.  And even better, Papers organizes all of your authors so that you can quickly search for anyones latest papers and then dump them into you library.  You can read a paper in full screen mode, leave notes on them, and open several papers at once in multiple tabs.  I still need to print out papers that I want to read very closely, but the full screen view is good.  And the iPhone version is in the works.  This app does not produce reference lists, so I wind up exporting references from Papers into Endnote when writing manuscripts.  This bit of hassle is worth it to add the organizational and search power not offered by programs like Endnote.  

I have converted one friend already to Mac in part because of this app.  If you are on Mac already you have to check it out.  And I am not getting paid for this endorsement.