Podcasts

With Spike@School you'll never be left behind when it comes to the latest and greatest web technology! We implemented Podcasting in response to customers wanting to publish content that their classes had made. If you don't know what a Podcast is:

  • A Podcast is basically a collection of audio or video files accompanied by a special file that we call a RSS Feed. This feed contains information about every file in the collection (like who made it and when it was made) and is able to be read by 'Feed Readers' like iTunes. The 'Feed Readers' will download the latest file in the feed so that you can listen to it later on. It will also regularly check the feed and if it discovers you've added a new file it will automatically download that file for the user.

Podcasting sounds simple but it's actually really hard if you're trying to write the feeds manually, that's where we come in. We've made the process dead simple. First you add a Podcast Series to your site:

Add a New Podcast Series

Then you add a new Episode (or many). You can come back here later on to add more when you've finished making them:

Add a New Episode

Once you have at least one Episode you can view your Podcast Series on your site. For those who don't have iTunes (or another feed reader) Spike@School allows you to browse the Podcast Series manually:

Front Podcasts

As you can see it's all nice and user-friendly. There is one Episode in our Series and you can click on it to see more info about it and to download the actual file and listen to it. Here's what it looks like in a feed reader that comes with the Firefox web browser:

Front Podcasts Firefox

What a great way to present your students work to parents!

Next we have Contacts Directories...