Saturday, June 09, 2007

Podcasting the Message home


At our last Subject leaders event I got people to consolidate the key messages and themes of the last few months, these being Podcasting and E-safety. Subject Leaders had to work together to create a podcast on the theme of E-safety. I was surprised by the quality of the finished work and the enthusiasm that people brought to the task. It also taught me again that giving people time to play is so valuable. Actually play is almost the wrong word, perhaps the phrase should be 'confidence-gain'.

Very often the reason people are against an ICT application is that they deem it too difficult or they see little relevance in it. With some time and differentiated levels of hand-holding the results can be dramatic. And what's more when an application,process or use of ICT has been demystified for someone, it wont take long before it becomes a regular part of their teaching repertoire.

As an inspiration for the Podcasting task we used the Key Stage 1 E-safety materials. These use the character Dongle to put over the SMART rules, through a very funny and catchy video. I am not sure any of us could quote the full list of SMART rules verbatim at the beginning of the afternoon, but by 4:10 (beyond our normal time), we had some excellent work and we could all quote the SMART rules for E-safety. Hopefully this work will bear fruit in schools with teachers learning how to Podcast from their subject leaders.



The winner received a plastic Cyberman that Woolworths had reduced to £2.99. You can see her joy as David presented her with her prize in the picture below. Well done Amanda and team, you deserved it, for sheer effort! Howver there was another close contender for the prize. Click on the runner up below and marvel at the weirdness! I hope to post the other Podcasts on the Redbridge site soon.


To listen to the Podcast- click on the Cyberman above
To listen to the runner up- click on the icon

On this occasion we used Audacity and in order to aid our work I created a web page of links and tutorials for everyone to follow.


No comments: