Fizzics

I had a light bulb moment last week.  It followed on from my post about the inset I gave on the first day back after the October break.  I’d been screencasting and uploading narrated worked example to Youtube but I was still relying on pupils actually bothering to go to my site to play the embedded files.  My idea was to highlight valuable resources by adding them as podcast content and have them pull everything on to their home computer and I realised I could use iTunes to do it.

I used Quicktime Pro to export the video in MP4 format.  I selected  the MP4 video format after reading this page which suggested it would be suitable for more than just iPods.  You wouldn’t have to use Quicktime for this, an online file conversion service like Zamzar would also work and save you some cash in the process.

I added the PodPress plugin to my Wordpress-powered classroom blog to handle the media files.  I don’t think you really PodPress but it does provide a neat and automatic icon for the media file in your blog post and it has a widget you can use to add an iTunes subscription button to your blog’s sidebar.  For me, the main piece of magic is the Feedburner feed.  This is a free service that has excellent features such as the smartcast option.

Smartcast is the killer feature.  It allows you to create an enclosure (the thing that iTunes looks for in your blog’s feed) for any rich media file.  This is a blanket term that includes file types such as MP3, MP4 and, more importantly, PDF.

So here’s what I’ve done.  Pupils in the class have subscribed to my podcast in iTunes to download fully commented solutions to their last homework exercise.  This evening, I finished creating their next set of questions and uploaded them to my site as a pdf.  Thanks to feedburner’s smartcast, the pdf quickly appeared in iTunes.  The next time my pupils open up iTunes, they’ll get the homework exercise downloaded automatically on to their computers and the following week they’ll receive the screencast showing the worked solutions as a video podcast.

I have no idea how this will go down with pupils.  When the novelty subsides, will they see it as a creepy tree house?  I don’t know if it’s all that different from having a VLE for school work, although pupils know fine well what to find when they log in there.  Is the delivery of homework by iTunes an invasion of their recreational space?

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