Shannon's Design Project

Design Idea

For my project, I would like to design a series of podcasts about tips for traveling in Central America. For this class, I would like to record two shows, one about Costa Rica and the other about Guatemala.

• My learning goal for the series is simply to inform/supply tips to travelers that have little to no experience traveling in Central America so that they are better prepared for their journey. After listening to the series, learners will be more informed on topics such as what type of transportation to take while in a particular Central American country, safety, and main attractions no traveler should miss.
• I think this topic is ideal for a podcast because learners can listen on the go. They can listen at the gym, in their cars, or on break at school or work. I always try to learn as much as I can about whichever foreign country I visit beforehand, but sometimes it's hard to find the time to sit down and read up prior to traveling (especially because I usually plan my vacations for right after a semester ends at school and I'm always way too busy with final projects to devote a lot of time to travel research).
• I envision my podcast to be something like The Amateur Traveler Travel Podcast series: http://amateurtraveler.com/. This series is designed to give travelers tips and information about various places around the world. It's a weekly series of enhanced podcasts with pictures of must see places.
• Since I have a MAC I'm going to give enhanced podcasting a shot. After reading more about file types, I have changed my mind. I'm probably going to use AAC as opposed to MP4 for my file type.

Audience

A description of my target learner population:

• My target population are busy adults, from students attending universities and colleges to the working professional, who want to get out of the country to do some traveling on breaks from school or vacations from work. Ideally, my podcast series will reach out to these individuals who are just too busy during the course of the day to do a lot of travel research before their trip. This population knows the importance of learning a bit about the place you're going to visit before getting there. My audience size will be limited to people who love to travel to Central America (because that's the focus of the show). So the audience probably won't be huge, but who knows, Central America has many great destinations and it's inexpensive to get to and close by, so my audience may be bigger than I think.
• My audience needs podcasts that are at most, no longer than an hour. They need the information to be short and sweet due to their busy lifestyles. My podcast will focus on travel tips, must see sights, and Spanish vocabulary and phrases that travelers must know in order to get around in Central America. Most importantly, my series is free, so even the poorest of college students can afford to listen!
• My audience can listen to my podcasts whenever it suits their busy schedules. They can listen while showering in the morning, getting ready for school or work, driving in the car, running, exercising at the gym, during breaks at school or work, etc. Chances are, many of my listeners will not sit still and listen to the show, they're way too busy.
• My listeners will subscribe for many of the reasons I've stated above; they're busy but want to take the time to learn something about the country they'll be visiting beforehand. They won't unsubscribe because the show will be fun and entertaining and will focus on things they should know before traveling and must see places they won't want to miss. Also, I'm pretty sure that once a traveler gets a taste of a country in Central America they'll want to visit them all. They may not be able to do that right away but they can enjoy hearing about various countries in this region of the world during my series. This will help them plan future trips.

Content

Title: Insider's Guide to Central America

• Ideally, my audience will have at their disposal maps of the region, a Spanish pocket dictionary, and several websites to use as extra resources during my podcasts.
• The podcast series will be called Insider's Guide to Central America and each episode will center around 3 themes:
  • Things to do
  • Must see sights
  • Emails from Listeners
• Each show will be region specific; I will focus on one region at a time and discuss several locales to visit within the region before moving on to the next. ie., Northern Guatemala aka the Peten Department, and the locales within this department would be my theme for several weeks before I moved on to a different department within the country.
• The first show will focus on El Remate, a town in the Peten Department and the gateway to Tikal National Park. In this episode I will discuss things to do in the town, must see sights, and answer emails from listeners.
• In the second show I will talk about Tikal National Park. The discussion will focus on the 3 themes outlined above. I also included a travel tip of the week segment in the second show.
• In the following episodes I will talk about Santa Elena and Flores, sister towns in the Peten Department. Then I will move to a different region of Guatemala and discuss several towns in that region. Areas for discussion are Antigua, Guatemala City, Lake Atitilan and the small, beautiful towns that surround the lake, such as Panajachel. Then I will move on to a different Central American country such as Belize or Costa Rica. Maybe I will mix the sequence of these shows up so that I am not talking about one country for 2 months straight. I could discuss one region of a country, then move to a different country and then at some point revisit the first country I discussed.
• I will include reference to the Moon guidebook in my podcast. I will also recommend that anyone interested in the region get a copy of the guidebook for more information.
• I am creating an enhanced podcast and plan to use the pictures I took while on vacation in Guatemala in my podcast. I will also include background music in my podcast as well as a stinger to delineate segments of the show. In the second show I also added a sound effect of water dripping in a cave during a portion of the show where I discuss crawling through some of the tunnels under the ruins in Tikal. I thought this was a fun effect.

Format

Style and format of the podcasts:

• I decided to go with a radio show type of style for my podcast because I thought this would be more entertaining/engaging for my listeners than a lecture. For each show I will have an Intro, then a discussion about the travel destination, including sights to see and things to do, then I have a segment where I answer questions emailed in from listeners before I close with an Outro. In the second episode I will also include a travel tip of the week segment right after the intro.
• I will use AAC file formats for my episodes since I am using Garageband and creating enhanced podcasts.
• The length of each episode will be 5-7 minutes long (if I really were creating episodes for the general public they would probably be anywhere from 15 minutes to a half an hour). I plan on having a bi-weekly or monthly show.
• Recurring elements in each episode:
• I will identify myself as the host of the show and state the title of the show during the Intro portion of each episode. Background music, which I found in Garageband, will play throughout the Intro and Outro of each episode. Each show will also have a certain stinger sound clip that I found in Garageband to transition between the segments of the show.
• I will not need to make any special arrangements for most shows, however I may choose to interview guests from time to time so I will need to coordinate with them prior to those episodes (I will not be interviewing anyone for my podcast episodes for this class).
• The standard setting for my podcasts when I publish it them is AAC, musical podcast, which is the best option for optimal sound quality for podcasts with music in them.

Evaluate & Refine

Design self-evaluation:

My initial thoughts on my first show are that it went pretty well but I was frustrated with the editing process. I am taking a podcasting workshop before the second episode is due so I hope to learn some new techniques for editing and refining my shows. I know there's got to be a better way to do things! Overall though, I think I did a good job with the first show but I hope to improve on my technique and the sound quality on the second show.

• The sound quality of my show is good, I tried to minimize all background noise and I recorded in my bedroom so there would be less of an echo. I also published the podcast with the stereo option on (instead of mono). When I listen to my podcast I can hear sound in stereo, however, Matt noted that he could only hear my show out of the right channel so I'm not sure what the problem is. I'll double check this before I publish the second show. Also for the next show I plan to make the intro and outro music a little quieter so that there is no problem being able to hear me talking.
• I made lots of edits to my audio files after I recorded the track. I cut out whole sections to stick to the alloted time frame and I cut out um's and ah's. I also went back and included music and stingers on the jingles track. I tried to record my episode in chunks so that if I made a mistake during the recording I could just cut that segment and start the recording over. I thought this would be easier than trying to make a whole bunch of edits after the fact. I don't know if this technique saved me much time in the long run.
• Besides the improvements I've already mentioned above, I plan to slow down when I talk so that it doesn't sound as if I'm on warp speed during the show. I have read that this is a common mistake to make when recording podcasts so I plan to fix that for the second round. I am also going to play around with microphone placement and see if I can get my recording to sound even better. During the second episode I also plan on including more historical facts about the location, which should be easy since I'm talking about ancient Maya ruins.