26th July 2006

Podguides and virtual field trips

posted in creativity, podcasting, travel |

Karen Montgomery introduced me to Podguides today.

Podguides graphic

According to the about podguides page:

A PodGuide is a very simple thing. It’s the combination of a map (PDF or JPG) of a certain place with numbered dots on it and a series of audio tracks (mp3) which you can download for your iPod. Each numbered dot corresponds with the track number you should play to hear the audio comment about that specific place on the map. If your mp3 player supports the viewing of artwork from the ID-3 tags in mp3 files, then you’ll also be able to see a picture of what you should be looking at whilst playing a track. Think of an audio tour in a museum, but not limited to just that. You could have a PodGuide about the 10 coolest pubs in London for example, or a PodGuide which shows you the most known historic buildings in Bruges.

How cool is this?! (VERY cool!) One of the biggest takeaways for me is that the site has podguide (i.e. enhanced podcast) generators not only for Macintosh, but also for Windows and Linux! Until now I thought the only way to create an enhanced podcast was to use Garageband– meaning that Windows and Linux users couldn’t make them. Apparently this is not so! How cool!

Check out the Podguide HowTo page for instructions about creating a podguide, and at the bottom you’ll see the links for the cross-plaform Podguide generator application (incidentally created with RealBasic — Maybe I should learn how to do some basic programming in this environment… “Cross-platform compilation” is HUGE!) :-)
You (and your children or grandchildren, if available) have a new assignment for this summer! Create a short podguide together about your local town or city, or about a location you visit on a summer trip! What fun!

And if you are a teacher, you’ll be able to show that to your students in the next (or current) school year– and then help them create their own podguides!

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 10:35 am and is filed under creativity, podcasting, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 2 responses to “Podguides and virtual field trips”

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  1. 1 On July 27th, 2006, Cheryl Oakes said:

    Thanks to Karen and Wes for this really cool tool. Off to check it out and think of the ways to use it in our schools, tour of the school, tour of the community, tour of a wilderness path……tour of a …

    Cheryl

  2. 2 On February 23rd, 2007, Frank De Graeve said:

    Hello Wesley,

    I’m afraid I’m about to burst that bubble of hapiness obout the podguide generator. I created that app to get the ’submission’ process of a PodGuide more streamlined. What it basically does is gather all the pictures, the map and the extra explanatory comments for each track. If you add the individual mp3 files to it, and zip the whole package, then I basically get all the data I need to create an enhanced vesion out of that.

    It does not however generate ‘Enhanced’ PodGuides. As you mentioned, that is still only possible to create on an Apple. The resulting enhanced files however are playable on iTunes on both Windows and OS X, and on iPods. I will however put the original package (mp3’s that can be played by every mp3 player) on line also.