Podcast Evaluation

A. Investigate


Before we started researching about podcast, we interviewed peers and one of our parents to ask about their teenage life. I interviewed five friends and my mom. While I was interviewing people, I was very busy since it was the time which I came back to UB from Seoul. Therefore I was rushing through all the processes, and I realized that I should have worked on these interviews while I was in Korea. Interviewing was not a hard work to do; creating some questions about adolescence, send the notes to people, and organizing and publishing their answers were basically all the processes I was supposed to do. However, bad time managing has resulted me being procrastinating, and cramming. Therefore, I thought a good plan and pushing myself to follow the plan were very important.


Investigating about podcast was a very interesting task, especially when I was listening to some examples of podcasts. I was supposed to research what podcast is and how it is made. Also I needed to listen to at least three different podcasts in order to get some ideas that what I should include in my podcast. While I was researching, I was able to learn a lot about podcast. I have heard of podcast, but I did not know much about how it is created. Through out researching, I got information of the definition of podcast, and how people, or an organization explain their thoughts or ideas through podcasting. (I firstly thought that podcast was one of products from Apple company :p) Furthermore, iTunes helped me a lot while I was struggling to find examples of podcasts. I listened to podcasts that were based on sciences and meditation for teenagers. All three podcasts were very informative, and I was very impressed by the way how they speak; very clear with nice music. No mistakes... (While I was recording my script, it was VERY hard to finish it without making mistakes!)


I think I could've done some more researches on podcast, because when I was publishing a podcast, the recording system was not in a very good quality, and it was pretty hard to record it without any noise. I could've researched what equipmetns that I could use in order to record in a better way. I finished investigating on time, but I was sort of rushing in the end. I always mention it on my evaluation, but I seriously need to manage my time better. From now on, I should make myself to work on a project everyday, even though I use only a few minutes on it, so that I can get used with good time management without procrastination.

B. Design

Brainstorming for podcast designs were very interesting. Since the topic needed to be related to adolescence, I wrote down some ideas; however, most of them were sort of depressing. (such as teen suicide, stereotypes, etc) Because I'm also a teenager, I think making a design on these topics tend to be easy. When I was working on some previous projects, I needed some further research in order to get some sketch, or design ideas. But for this one, a lot of ideas just came into my head.

My three designs were based on: teenage suicide, wild teen life (drugs, smoking...) and stereotypes. I thought these themes were very interesting for me, and since the I chose topics that I liked, it was pretty easy to organize what I'm going to put for my podcast.

The final design, which was about teenage suicide, was created well without any big problems. I didn't want to make my podcast to controversy (since the topic itself is already controversy), so I just organized some simple lists of what would be included as contents.

I posted the designs on time, and I think there were no big problems happened while I was working on the process. One thing that might be weakness of my designs is that I got some ideas from some of my friends designs. I did not exactly follow what I was going to put in my podcast, but when I couldn't come up with some topics, I looked into others' blogs and got a few from theirs. Lucklily, I do not think no body else worked on teen suicide for thier final product, but I think I could've come up with some more original ideas. Therefore, I need to spend more time to consider what topics might be original enough and creative so that I could make better designs.

C. Plan

Creating plan was a very complicated process, especially for this project. I created a plan that I could work on my product during the break; however, the plan didn't work at all. The plan was specific enough, with all the steps I need to do and how much time I should spend for each day. But the problem was that A) since it was break, there were some other events that I did not expect, which I could not follow the plan as I planned, B) many people were on a trip to other countries, which made me hard to interview them. Even though I could contact them through the internet, the time difference was also a problem. On the whole, the plan seemed it was impossible to follow.

Then I created a new plan. It's not like a totally different plan, but I re-organized it. I wrote down the dates that I actually worked and followed the plan. After that I put some changes on it.

Making a plan always helps me to be organized and disciplined. However, I still need to be more used with following plans, and creating a realistic one.

D. Create

For create process, I wrote my scipt for the podcast, recorded it, and published the podcast. Writing script was very fun, and I really enjoyed writing my script. The information that I got from websites about teenage suicide helped me to make my script more interesting. I included causes of teen suicide, some interviews and ways to prevent suicides. I was kind of worried that what if people feel bored about my contents of podcast; however, after I asked for several people to read my script, the result was pretty good. People enjoyed reading my script, and they were looking forward to listen to my podcast.

Then I recorded my podcast. First, I used iPod voice recorder, but there were so much noises so my voice was not clear enough. Then I used my laptop recorder, and the quality of voice was better. The thing that annoyed me so much was that I made so many mistakes while I was recording. I tried to record the entire script without pausing the recorder, but it was impossible. I sometimes pronounced words awkwardly, and I often skipped some lines while I was recording. Then I decided to record one paragraph at one time. So, overall there were about 9 recordings, and I used moviemaker to combine them into one mp3 file. Since I recorded my script separately, my voice tend to sound different for each recording, so the flow of the voice was not smooth enough. I thought if I had a professional equipment to record the script, I think it would have been better. After I published my podcast and listened to it, I felt kind of funny since I was listening to the recording of my own voice :p. Nevertheless, it was a very interesting process.

The biggest problem that I faced while I was working on podcast was testing my podcast. My original plan was to publish on youtube and ask for people to listen to my podcast and make a comment either on my blog or facebook. I've sent messages to people so that they could listen to my podcast; however, it was exam week and everyone was busy. So, no one actually made a comment about my podcast. Therefore, I needed to ask my classmates face-to-face to listen to my podcast. I put the link on my blog and after they listened to my podcast, they made some comments. They were saying that my voice was not very clear, but the contents were interesting and very related to adolescence. So I think that the result of testing is pretty good, even though I had to change my testing plan.

To sum up, making a podcast was very new to me, and I learned a lot from this project. I learned not only about podcasts, but also some facts about teenagers and their lives. Sometimes I felt we spent too much time on this project, and I got sort of bored. However, after I'm done with all the processes, I think it was an unique experience that gave me a lot of information. :)