I have had several media specialists ask me about creating podcasts of student book reviews that can be accessed with QR codes, so I thought I would post a simplified explanation of the process. After some thought, I decided this would be a great excuse to use LiveBinder, a very effective tool for collecting web resources and putting them together in one easy to navigate interface. You can access the LiveBinder I created here and pass on reading the steps listed below since it is all there as well. There is also a tab for a site created by Melinda Caldwell (Scott County) who has become the local QR code guru and has been creating podcasts and QR codes for quite sometime now.
The steps below are simply adapted from the LiveBinder referred to above:
Step 1: You must record the podcast. Garage Band is free and already loaded onto Macs (see the Garage Band tab in my LiveBinder for tutorials). PC users can download Audacity, but you will also need to download something called the lame encoder to convert your file to an MP3 player. This can be done from the Audacity site.
Step 2: You need to upload the podcast to a host on the web somewhere. If it were a video, you would have numerous choices including schooltube, youtube, teachertube, and google docs. For some reason, there are fewer choices for audio files. Kiwi6 is free and seems to work well. You can easily set up an account and then upload the file.
Step 3: Once your mp3 file is on the web, you will need to find and copy the URL for it. This is generally located in the “share” menu along with the embed code.
Step 4: Use a free service like Google URL Shortener or Tiny URL to create a QR code. They both do this automatically when you shorten the URL and they both track how many times the URL has been clicked.
Step 5: Copy and paste the QR code into a word doc and print!
