Moving at the Speed of Creativity

I was delighted to see the following three digital audio recorders available for purchase at a Missouri Wal-Mart somewhere between Oklahoma City and St Louis last night around 8 pm. (There are a lot of sub-$100 digital audio PLAYERS out there, but fewer that are RECORDERS supporting portable voice recording that is ideal for podcasting.)

Creative Zen V Plus 1GB MP3 Video Player:

ilo MP3 player and recorder (couldn’t find this on walmart.com for some reason):

SanDisk Sansa c240 1GB Photo MP3 Player

:

Other sub-$100 digital recorders listed on the Wal-Mart website that I didn’t see in the store last night include:
- Philips SA4010 1GB Flash Digital Audio Player - $60
- Creative Zen Nano Plus 1 GB MP3 Player - $60

A few things to notice among these choices:
- The Sansa also supports photo playback.
- The Creative Zen supports both photo and video playback.
- All of these have 1 GB of storage. (That’s a lot for compressed audio!)
- None of these are Mac or Linux compatible.

Unless I’m missing something (and I don’t think I am, because I have been checking Wal-Mart for several weeks now looking for exactly these types of digital audio recorders) it seems like some sort of tipping point has been reached. This is the first time I’ve seen sub-$100 digital audio recorders in Wal-Mart that support transfer to a computer. Previously, the only ones I’d seen were by Memorex– and the ones that supported PC file transfer were all more than $100.

Online ordering is great, but for classroom teachers contemplating podcasting I think having products come down in price and be sold at Wal-Mart is an important thing. I regard my portable digital audio recording devices as the most important pieces of equipment I have for podcasting.

In the old west, the tool of the trade for every cowboy (at least the mythological ones we seem to believe in) was the six gun.

I consider portable digital audio recorders to be essentials in my citizen journalist arsenal of “tools.” In my continuing quest for an inexpensive digital audio recorder for classroom teachers, my new favorite portable podcasting tool of choice is definitely the Samsung YP-U2J audio player.

No cables required or to lose, no batteries required, strong, clear audio pickup for voice recording and the simplicity of just plugging it into the USB drive of your computer make it my current recommendation for portable digital recording for classroom podcasters. (I bought one for our church this past weekend at Circuit City for $60.)

My biggest gripe is: All of these recorders (if the packaging on each of them can be believed) are ONLY compatible with Windows OS computers. You’d think more computer manufacturers would realize there are now more viable choices than ever for computer operating systems, and products which function in multiple OS environments have a greater potential marketshare!

This is another example of “Windows-focused” thinking which still seems to drive many in both business and education. Despite this shortcoming, it is exciting to see that some sort of $100 tipping point for portable digital audio recorders seems to have been passed! If you have $60 or can talk your local PTA out of $60, there are few tools I can recommend more highly for classroom teachers interested in podcasting and digital storytelling than a portable digital audio recorder like one of these.

Technorati Tags: podcasting

On this day..

• Responses to Growing Up Online - 2008
• Learning should be an invitation, not a mandate - 2008
• SL as the wild west? - 2007
• Podcast133: Ideas for Addressing Cyberbullying - 2007
• Tools of the 21st century educational road warrior - 2007
• No ties, no problem - 2007
• WOW2 skype interview Tues, Feb 27th - 2007
• Great School 2.0 thoughts from Will, Chris and Steve - 2007

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.