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Internet Radio


Nick Falk

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Copy of my posting in the science area

I have had this idea that the next vehicle for schools publicising themselves to their local community should be an Internet radio station. Most schools have a website that provides information to parents and students about the running of the school and the curriculum on offer. Some have started to create of a digital curriculum and have students creating their learning material.

Could this be supplemented by a schools own web radio?

Is Internet radio 'an untapped treasure' as recently suggested by Glenys Hart in the December edition of Educational Computing and Technology?

I have been encouraging teacher in my own school to consider the potential of in-house Internet radio programmes being made available to students and learners in the local community.

Here is an Internet radio station which I have been running fo a few years. Not geared to the curriculum

http://www.live365.com/stations/285707

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  • 2 months later...

I came across this accidentally and maybe providentially! Here in tasmania, Australia I have a student avidly interested in radio, he has started using the school PA system at lunchtimes to broadcast music with a very limited commentary. As the PA is in the office area it isn't the best place to try to run a radio station. How did you set up your station and how does it operate?

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Hi

I stumbled across Live365.com in its early days. At that time the service was free. Now the cost are relatively small for the basic service. This limits the listener numbers and the programme will loop continually. Check the site for the costing of more advanced services including live broadcasting.

I have not found any other provider of this service but I am investigating whether the local education authority server could be used to host this type of service. They may need some persuading.

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  • 1 month later...
Guest Andrew Moore

I'm not sure that it needs to be characterized as radio (since, in one sense, it isn't). This label is fair enough when there is an Internet counterpart to an existing broadcast station (as with many BBC networks). But if it's digital audio on the Web, then that's what it is.

I do, on the other hand, think that there is a great future in creating digital audio files, using voice and maybe sound FX, as learning objects.

In my own fields of English and drama they have immense potential.

One challenge to end users is that these typically are large data files, so take a long time to download or stream.

But the emergence of broadband solves this.

My LEA server allows streaming of mp3 and Real Audio (with m3u and ram files). And if the request comes from a PC in a school, then the file does not get stuck in the bottleneck of the public Internet (where we have limited bandwidth, being used by zillions of clients). Instead it can come down the local superhighway as swiftly as it would move over a local area network.

Similarly, a commercial Web hoster would not allow enough storage for much of this stuff - but my network guru assures me that we have vast quantities of it, and can build a media library. For example, why not have thousands of classic poems, and even novels? (Yes, I know that these might be huge - I have recorded most of the first chapter of Great Expectations in mp3 and rm formats - and this is about 5 Mb and 2.8 Mb respectively - so the whole novel would be in the order of 250 or 150 Mb. On the other hand, you would probably not want the whole of such a long prose text, when you can use text-to-speech software to read it from a .txt file - that would be less than 1Mb for the whole novel.)

I'm also looking at authoring systems that allow one to show objects and activities on one's own computer, while overlaying this with audio commentary - in some form such as Quicktime.

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