Thing 21 - Videocasts and Podcasts

I've heard about podcasting and vidcasting, but had never gotten a clear picture about what they were. Now that I've created a videocast through Photostory 3, the benefits of this program in the classroom, boardroom, and other areas are easy to see. Library2Play gives these ideas: "Book reviews posted on line for sharing with other students, book reviews done by a librarian or teacher for "virtual" or "digital" booktalks, sharing a voice performance with others, sharing a presentation at a conference or other such gathering so that those unable to attend can hear the speaker." No offense to Animoto, but vidcasting has the same bells and whistles plus quite a bit more. Additional features include the ability to add narration, manually choose slide transitions, unlimited length for presentation (a membership fee has to be paid to play a presentation over 30 seconds on Animoto), publishing to a remote program such as .wmv (Animoto is played strictly through its website). I plan on using vidcasting during this coming school year. I can easily see my first project being a short Social Studies/History vidcast to be used with an Activstudio lesson. [2 days later] I've tried to download this vidcast, in wmv format, and not gotten more than 31 secs out of an approximately 3 min discussion with music accompaniment. I then converted the wmv to mov (Quicktime) and avi, both acceptable by Blogger, but neither of those loaded either. Very annoying. Oh, did I mention that I gave it 10 HOURS to load?