Audacity is a tool that I have had in my toolkits for a couple of years. While I use it occasionally, I tend to set my students loose on it much more frequently. Uses include an interview tool, oral response and most recently to have elementary aged children reading books. The book reading is serving two purposes: a digital repository of books for “listening to reading” and a part of that child’s e-portfolio.
Where I am struggling with podcasting is finding the an appropriate moodle plugin. Up until recently we used Podcast Activity module, but with load balancing servers this would not work. IT also does not like this module because it is unsecure. The suggestion found at Moodle is to use a MP3 attached to a forum post to generate the RSS required. Has anyone tried this? Does it work?
I find using audacity is not very labour intensive and very easy to use. Even the most novice user is familiar with the record, stop and export interface. The challenge for me is to now make the next leap to publicly publishing in iTunes. Included in this is ensuring that any music loops and sounds are properly cited properly and have the correct attribution license for reuse.
I will say that alongside Audacity I also use other web 2.0 tools for audio. Some that I have found success with have been:
Interesting question. What’s the benefit of hosting within Moodle versus an external server and linking to the mp3 files? That would lessen the load balance issues and still allow you to leverage RSS feeds (within the discussion forums) to distribute.