I’ve been podcasting for a few years now, but I wouldn’t say that my podcasts have been big hits with my students. To be honest, most don’t bother to listen. I don’t feel bad about that because some don’t even listen to my live lectures when they come to class. But I’ve been tossing some ideas around to make my podcasts more interesting and useful to students. One idea that I came up with is creating an avatar for my online courses that will deliver short podcasts to students. The podcasts will include daily updates, writing and research tips, and general motivation.
I’m using SitePal to create my avatar, which I have dubbed as my associate professor Samantha. Sam is posted as a widget on the sidebar of my class blog. When students visit the page, Sam speaks to them when they mouse over the widget. The short podcasts that Sam speaks are created by using text to voice software, TextAloud. I posted about the software just last week. The program makes it easy to create podcasts by simply typing the text into the window and hitting Speak to file. The new voices offered through Nuance RealSpeak Voices are surprisingly life like, although you can definitely tell it’s computer generated. They’re better than the free voices that come with the program, so it’s worth spending a few more bucks.
Speaking of spending bucks, this is not a cheap endeavor. A yearly license for SitePal runs $99 for the Bronze package. If you upgrade to the Silver for $199 a year, you get text to speech (TTS) added for free, but you’re limited to 1 minute of audio. Using the $29 TextAloud program allows you to create audio files as long as you want, and you can change voices if you want. I’m going to call and ask about the 1 minute limitation in Sitepal. You can also use the TextAloud program for other things like reading your email.
Sam has her own page on the blog where all of her podcasts are housed. They are not in blog form, so an automatic RSS feed is not generated. To create the podcast aspect of this audio, I’m using Odeo. I created a separate podcast in Odeo for Sam, and I upload the audio files there, thus creating a RSS feed for students to subscribe to. 
There’s not much there yet because this is for my summer online course which begins in July ‘07. So Sam doesn’t really exist, but don’t tell my students that. I’m hoping that she will be able to interact with students by answering their questions and providing advice. It’s not too time consuming for me since I don’t have to make the audio recordings myself. All I have to do is write the script, similar to just answering an email message which I do quite a bit of. TextAloud does the rest in quite surprising efficiency. Once I have the final output audio, it goes into iTunes for conversion from WAV to mp3, then upload to Sitepal and Odeo. I have high hopes, so only time will tell. Visit my class blogs to have a look:
Filed under: podcasting, podcasts, web 2.0
One important note is to read the license agreements with the voices. The better sounding voices come with restrictions related to uploading audio for others to hear.
If you want to use this type of technology in E-Learning, we just launched NOAH, the next generation of web-based talking animated character technology. NOAH will allow the web site or E-Learning application to present a much higher engagement and interactivity opportunity to the user as compared to the other web based solutions. Our system also does not need constant connectivity to the internet so it is very useful in CD based and E-Learning projects. You can see NOAH in action at http://noahx.com.
Hello there,
This is Vanessa from SitePal. Your podcast idea is fantastic. We thought you might be interested in checking out our new Virtual Translator demo. Type anything you want and an animated character will translate for you and speak it in another language!
http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_tran_example.php?sitepal
For more demos you can go here: http://www.sitepal.com/demos
Thanks!