Sue Waters

You would think, as a podcaster, that putting together a presentation on podcasting would be easy? NOPE! Not when the presentation will be online using a Virtual Classroom which adds so many more factors to the equation especially when you want to make it interactive (which is much easier f2f) and you actually want to play some podcasts (a lot more can go wrong playing media in a virtual classroom than f2f)

Thankfully Philip was nice to spend some of his holiday (again) today with me and we road tested the different options for playing podcasts in Elluminate.

We worked out that:

• Web tour did not work – the podcasts I wanted to play open up in another window
• Application sharing was not great – the podcasts played poorly (stop, started)
• Media library – worked really well especially for the video podcast. I could not get the audio podcasts to play on my PC (kept coming up with debugging error – fortunately when I pressed play it did play on Philip’s PC even if it was not playing on mine)

So media library with Elluminate is the way to go but:

• Means I must log into session early and upload all videos and audios (as they take awhile to upload)
• Need to ensure participants have Quicktime plugin installed on their PCs before the session

Make sure you check file format if you plan to play video using media library in Elluminate as only some formats are supported.

Still concerned because I need a good Plan B & C in case the podcasts fail to play. Perhaps one option is to have links on standby for them to use directly from the PCs? Perhaps the Classroom Online network facilitators have some suggestions?

Oh well, and just to add to the stress the next online presentation will not be in Elluminate, they will be using a different Virtual Classroom. (

Here is my presentation for the first online session. Any suggestions for changes happily accepted. PS I do know the alphabet – for some reason Slideshare does some weird things when you upload PowerPoints – this time it has changed my letter bullets!

Thanks for your help, yet again, Philip – must mean I owe you really big chocolate frog?