PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
150
Printable copies of the guide are available for purchase and immediate download at
Now that you have addresses for both a blog and a RSS feed, you can distribute
these to students. Consult the earlier section of the guide, “Manually Subscribing to
Podcasts,” to review how to input the RSS URL into iTunes.
Uploading Podcast Episodes to a Server
This section covers how to place podcast files on a server. If you’re using ClickCaster or
iTunes U to distribute your files (as described above), you can ignore this section.
However, if you want to learn how to transfer your episodes to a remote server and
discover how to create an RSS feed and WordPress blog for your podcast, read on. So,
why go through all this trouble if you can simply use a service such as ClickCaster to
distribute your podcast? ClickCaster makes podcasting quick and easy, but it doesn’t
offer the options or control over your files you get by hosting your own files.
At this point, I’m going to assume that you’ve signed with a hosting provider and have
been given your site’s IP address. Depending on which provider you use, the file
structure on the server may be slightly different from that presented here. While this
demonstration will show how to connect and transfer (upload) files to an IX Web Hosting
account, connecting to other hosting providers should work in much the same way. If you
run into problems, contact your provider for support.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Using Professor Yearwood’s fictional AHPY podcast as an example, we’re going to
launch an FTP program to connect to and upload the podcast files to our server. First,
you’ll need an FTP client. If you’re using a Mac, download and launch the excellent
FTP program for PC (Free, PC, http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/) for this task.
After launching Cyberduck, you’ll need to fill in several fields to connect to your server. Of
course, you’ll have to be connected to the Internet to make this work. Figure 96 shows
the fields you’ll need to complete in order to connect to the server. Your hosting provider
will provide you with the information necessary to complete these fields (generally, the
information is provided in an email sent to you by the provider minutes after you create
your account).
