Podcasting Course @ Teachers Centre

Welcome to the Teachers Centre Podcasting Course

Introductory Video:

Schools that Podcast- Examples:

Fairlop Primary Redbridge and Redbridge Primary Redbridge scroll down to the Redbridge area of the LGFL Podcast site and find these two schools and their growing number of channels.

Other examples of Podcasting schools

Cefn Forest Primary

The Downs FM

Questions-

Why Podcast?

What does it value does it add to the classroom?

How do we manage it in the classroom?

Resources - Safe music and short clips to Podcast with

Flashkit- recommended to me by the great Joe Dale- an easy to navigate site with lots of cool loops,many of which sound fresh and urban, therefore great for the Radio Show style Podcast

LGFL Audio Site- a large bank of audio tracks-these come in a range of lengths and as it is provided by LGFL there is no danger of meeting any inappropriate text.

Podsafe Audio- free to use songs and instrumnetal pieces- an idea to download s safe selction first, rember to attrribute the artist and titel.

How to use the Lgfl podcasting site booklet- a PDF guide to using the podcasting site, also available on the Help section of the above site.

Soundsnap.com- an extensive site of soundclips- a bit like flickr for sounds effects- It might be an idea to find what you want first and download into a shared file on the school network, rather than letting children search, this is because the site has such a vats collection and entering bodily functions or synonyms of these will provide the user with some quite un podcastable sounds.

Hosting for your Podcasts:

Podcast.lgfl.org.uk- you do not need to use any other service- this is free and comes with an easy to use site and huge storage

Other Useful Links

Teachers TV Podcasting Information- this includes a Teachers Tv programme showcasing Podcasting in secondary education.

Redbridge Podcasting Network - a group of three of our schools. who are commited to finding out what good looks like in Primary podcasting.

The Podium Blog- examples of good work from around the country using Podium

Podcast Central - a resource on the London Grid for learning that contains links and how tos for Podcasting.


Todays Powerpoint:

will be here soon

Podcasting and Blogging Resources Training @Chadwell

Podcasting

A good example of a school that Podcasts
Fairlop Primary Redbridge and
Redbridge Primary Redbridge scroll down to the Redbridge area of the LGFL and find these two schools and the growing number of channels

Safe music and short clips to Podcast with

Flashkit- recommended to me by the great Joe Dale- an easy to navigate site with lots of cool loops,many of which sound fresh and urban, therefore great for the Radio Show style Podcast

LGFL Audio Site- a large bank of audio tracks-these come in a range of lengths and as it is provided by LGFL there is no danger of meeting any inappropriate text.

Soundsnap.com- an extensive site of soundclips- a bit like flickr for sounds effects- It might be an idea to find what you want first and download into a shared file on the school network, rather than letting children search, this is because the site has such a vats collection and entering bodily functions or synonyms of these will provide the user with some quite un podcastable sounds.

Hosting for your Podcasts:

Podcast.lgfl.org.uk- you do not need to use any other service- this is free and comes with an easy to use site and huge storage

Blogging





A good example of a school that Blogs:

Sandaig Primary Glasgow

Blogging Tools

Blogger.com- easy to use blogging tool- you will need a Google account but this is easily done. The downside with Blogger is the Next blog button at the top of the page, clicking on this could take you to a blog on any subject.

Blogmeister- Favoured by Paul Harrington, this tool allows you to show your pupils blogs on the same page as the teacher's blog comments. You will need to email the author of the excellent 2$ worth blog, Dave Warlick, in order to get a school pass code.

Blogging and Podcasting Best Practice

I am working on a lot of training and promoting of both Blogging and Podcasting over the next few weeks, indeed months. I would like to grab thoughts from readers of this blog, and also gain further insights into best practice.

If you would like to contribute to this presentation then please leave a comment/contact me.

Another week in ICT

Blogging and Podcasting-

Its all happening!
During Subject Leaders, I often nag (or as I like to call it inspire) people to make use of Web 2.0 applications. It is my opinion that all ICT subject leaders should be bloggers and I think we should not underestimate the power of the blog as both a communication and collaboration tool.Used regularly this could act as a direct link between home and school, pupil and pupil and pupils and teachers. What's more this tool allows the true application of the 'wisdom of crowds', or two heads are better than one. And all that aside, it is just so easy to blog, whereas the Dream weaver or digital brain made site is just a big hassle! For me the blog allow me to record my ICT journey and day to day experiences, while taking on board the encouragement, criticism or questions of others.

We have been talking about Blogging and Podcasting fro some time over the last few meetings. Many teachers had set up their Google home page to read my blog, or those of my favourites such as Simon Mills Inspirations site.

But this week I have begun to discover little fires of blogging and podcasting are beginning to be fanned into flame, and I hope that the success of these can be shared beyond the ICT rooms of those involved.

The first success comes from Val Barker @ Gearies Infants and all the other teachers who appear to have taken up the blogging challenge. Here Val has acted as a trainer and a pioneer, beginning the blogging process and showing others how to do it. Val is using the main blog as a sort of easy to publish website, while other teachers are using a blog to keep the choir up to date, while another rather visionary teacher is using a blog to carry out research with the children around poetry.

The author of the blog- who I believe is Dan ( one of our ASTS) hopes to work with the children to answer the following through his blogging.

Will a focus on increased first hand experiences of poetry and performances improve overall literacy attainment?

Can this idea be developed through a child autonomous research project?

In a nutshell, can we as adults scaffold a research process that allows children to unveil possible answers to the questions we would like to try and solve?

Readers of the Podcasting blog will know that this has also been an exciting week for Podcasting. We had the Podcasting network meeting, which allowed us to showcase the work and the plans for further work in: Manford, Fairlop and Redbridge. I was really struck by the work of the Year Two class at Fairlop, these children performed an interview with Samuel Pepys along with a song. They were clear, audible, engaged and using the correct vocabulary, all within an appropriate curriculum context. I also visited Hatton school this week, to look at (among other things) the podcasting work done by Dan Plane. Dan's work on Podcasting with children from a range of abilities has been picked up by Podium and is featured on their blog. When sitting in on a session I was taken with how pleased the children were to hear their compositions played back, surely a boost to their self esteem.

When thinking about Podcasting in the primary school, I think there are some important considerations and questions. Some of these I have the answers to, or at least bits of answers to in my head. I have listed these questions below and maybe other readers/bloggers may have some thoughts:

1. Why not just use a Tape Recorder? ( As first mentioned on Linda's blog)
2. Scripted or unscripted?
3. How do you organise a group of 30 children to create a set of podcasts and avoid background noise from each other?
4. Why bother- does it raise standards?
   

1. A tape recorder does not allow the easy manipulation of sound and editing of tracks that you get with Audacity or Podium. In ICT and Literacy children are supposed to review, modify and evaluate. When using a tape recorder then I am only able to review, in order to modify I need to erase the whole thing and rerecord.
2. Scripted or unscripted- From watching children (and adults) struggle to know what to say when placed in front of a mic it seems clear to me that children need a focus, otherwise they wonder why they're being asked to 'say something'. Rob from Redbridge raised the point that on real radio shows there are a team of researchers who compile show notes and questions for intervie, the show does not just happen! And though I can see that most schools begin with the experimental stage of podcasting. This may manifest itself as the test podcast or as an imitation urban style radio show. The challenge to teachers is how to take the medium form the club and into the classroom .
3. The key to managing 30 children creating podcasts is classroom management. This means not allowing the children to begin by selecting music as this can take too long and will mean they will quickly run out of time. As for having a class of 30 in and ICT suite with up to 15 microphones, yes this is hard and seems a recipe for failure, but it has worked in some schools. What do you think?
4. Why bother two reasons - The first was the look on the child's face i saw last Friday when she listened back to her podcast, clearly a boost to her self esteem. The other reason is a motivation to write. In Redbridge primary, the Podcast club have been given notebooks to create their scripts. They are told that these will not be marked and that they belong to the children. Remarkably these books are filling up very quickly with legible and detailed show notes and scripts.
   

SMARTBOARD WORK


This week I have worked with teachers on effective use of the IWB, or to put it more precisely the SMARTBOARD. I have been encouraged by those teachers who have been excited by the power and potential of the IWB. For some teachers it is a neglected resource, something that they may only know how to write on and run websites like Education City on. For others it is hard to consider life without it.

Among other things I have been promoting the key message around relevance and connection in what we display on the board. I elaborated under each of the slides below:


I have used Keepvid.com to download Youtube videos of fire engines form Ilford and Dagenham. Displaying one or all of these on the IWB will provide a powerful stimulus for writing, and as each clip does not actually show what happened next. Then we have a good platform to ask a range of higher order inference questions. Furthermore Literacy units in Year 2 and 3 often mention using films as texts.




The slide above shows a good context for shared writing. It combines a local image of Barking allotments along with the very cheap ( but essential) Oxford Reading tree clipart. It would be a good idea to create a notebook gallery file, in order to quickly access the resources. The same idea could be applied to the slide below.




The idea presented in this slide is that the IWB allows us to easily display images that are relevant to and within a child's everyday experience. So, rather than demonstrating counting with on-screen counters or flat clipart circles, why not also use objects like cola bottles or write word problems involving a WII or a number 25 bendy bus.

I am ( as always) keen to know your thoughts on the above

Podcast Lgfl Style

I am a regular user of the LGFL Podcast site and I believe we are lucky to have free web hosting for our Podcasts here in London. If you haven't seen this before visit Podcast.lgfl.org. Currently the site allows easy upload of Mp3 files,which are then freely available to listen to under the borough channels, or links can be made to the hosting site on websites or blogs.

While working with a class on Friday, I discovered the site has now been upgraded to include a record facility. This allows fifteen minutes of audio to be recorded online via a Java environment. This is a nice touch, but I am still a Podium fan, for sheer ease of use, capacity and offline availability for editing and improving.

I have said it before and I will say it again, when Podium .2.0 arrives, it will be the Primary Podcasting application as it will allow user to overlay tracks and narrate over music. Bring it on Softease please.

I would recommend that all Redbridge Primary schools make full use of the LGFL podcast site and upload their Podcasts here for free!! We are beginning to see some Redbridge content, but there is plenty of web server space for more.

First INSET of Autumn and I am on a Podium

What a great session I had earlier last week. Podcasting and the Renewed Framework @ Chadwell and all through the medium of 2Connect and with Podcasting done through Podium. It struck me once again that this is an extremely easy piece of software to use and get your head round. And yes I have blogged about this before, and there are many of you who will nag and say but Audacity is free. Yes it is and it can do things that Podium can not, but that will change, we eagerly await the upgrade and then that will make this the app for primary Podcasting on a Windows platform.

Why do I rave about it?

I think we have to remember audience when we talk about new applications. Teachers (and some ICT Coordinators are busy and sometimes even suspicious of new ideas). If an application is going to take a long time to work out, or if the interface looks unfamiliar they'll leave it to the tech teachers to do. This already happens in some schools, where the sexy bits of ICT gets done, while other units are brushed under the server or taken up with typing up/ finishing off or 'research (read googling about) for our Romans work'. The usual suspects : Colour Magic, Kartouche, 2Paint a picture, Newspapers in Word. get done to death while spreadsheets, control and databases get short shrift. So, with this in mind teachers need something easy, something they can switch on and work out quickly.


Podium has an easy interface with intuitive contols and a general ease of use, it just works and as a trainer I can trust it, and does all this without a lame encoder! I was interested to read Eneas's comments, about other soloutions,in the podium case study, which I think ring true of Audacity and is perhaps why a teacher said to me at the end of last term,'little ones (year 2) are too young to Podcast'


“We had heard of podcasting and had been talking about how to integrate it into the curriculum, but most of the software available was not appropriate for the age groups we work with and didn’t support joint projects. With other applications, we would have to do a lot of the work instead of allowing the children to run free with it, making it too hard for us to teach and too much for the children to learn.”

Eneas McNulty at St Mary Magdalen’s RC Junior

Here as promised are the two podcasts which I was given permission to share.

J and J

What is Podcasting?

Pleased to be working with the Manford Network again- we meet tomorrow to plan a year of podcasting fun and research.

Here are my thoughts about the medium:

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.

Audacity and 2Create a Story Mash up

Image: Rob Ireton

Following some inspiration from Simon's blog I have been pushing the envelope with 2Create a Story and Audacity. And I have used my ideas to support my MFL colleague in delivering a session on ICT and French earlier this week. When not working with ICT Subject Leaders, I have found that it is important to showcase the quick, easy and most appropriate ICT applications. For this reason I chose to use Photostory3 and 2Create a story. There are other more advanced applications, these have toolbars that are far more crowded than is acceptable to an occasional or phobic ICT user. This is why I favour Podium as a podcasting tool, rather than Audacity, even though Audacity allows you alter sound and multi track, whereas we have to wait a while for Podium 2.0 before such features are introduced. Podium is a an easier entry level application that will beeaier for the technophobe to eaily get on with. Though you need to know youRenewed Framework , in order to convince the Technocynic of it's value.

What we did

We begun by creating simple narrated slide shows of landmarks around Pairs and images of prepositions using a cuddly toy. To do this we used Photorsory3 - It is very easy to create a narrated slide show with this free application and mentioning it now, both here and @ INSETS now feels a bit old hat. However, the results one gets with this tool in only about 6 clicks are amazing, and they allow you to communicate meaning in a way that you would often struggle to do on paper- this is surely the heart of multi-modality. I remember seeing some of the MIRANDANET dissertation work @ a seminar in NAACE. I was struck then by the power and immediacy that this medium offered. It is clearly not the only method of communicating meaning, and surely we should not deny the power of the written word and we should continue to find ways to encourage children to craft poetry,arguments, adverts, emails etc with a pencil or a wordprocessor . Yet we can not deny that in our Youtube/Google Vido culture there are literally millions of online clips all competing for our attention. Those like the Maddy video , shown at the Cup final, have the power to provoke and stimulate our minds . And as the pictures are already on screen- you do not need to mentally conjure them up yourself.

Sound Recorder and Powerpoint

We created simple slides picture and text box in PowerPoint and hyperlinked the images with sound clips we had recorded in sound recorder. This allowed for simple teaching tasks- e.g. where is the teddy? Or in my case all my images were of Cybermen. I am afraid my French does not stretch to the cyberman is on top of the upgrade machine.The disadvantage of Powerpoint is that sounds can only be inserted in wav form which is a bit of a pain, when most sound clips are in mp3 format. And also Powerpoint and accompanying music are not easy bedfellows, hence Photostory 3.

Audacity and 2Create a Story

I was asked to show how using Audacity, voices can be changed by altering the pitch and (if your brave) modulation. By using this effect and downloading just two etrc small sound files / I was able to create the story below. This was not the serious outcome or objective, but a context I gave myself to help me internalise the process and skills needed to use audacity. I was amazed at the results. Almost all characters in the story are me! I am sure the idea was that teachers could get a native speaker to record stories in French and alter their voice digitally, or they could do this themselves. I think this great but surely the real value of recording audio in MFL or to be honest any lesson, would be the saving and uploading for later listening

The scales have fallen from my eyes

My Podcast Journey begins again here!!
I used to download Podcasts using Ipodder,back when I was in the classroom. though I mostly stuck to Pete Tong's Tongcast and the excellent Learn Excel form Mr Excel. Since then I have left podcasting alone for a while. Choosing instead to explore the likes of Youtube, in the hope that I could discover those visual nuggets for use in the classroom. Though there have been some great nature clips, examples of cyber bullying to scare teachers with, the odd Lego Robolab creation and the inspiring stuff on TED TALKS, I have to say though actual good quality classroom material has been lacking!

And now
This weekend I have been doing quite a bit of research on podcasting for an up and coming course. I have been struck by just how widespread this medium is, and by the fact that it isn't just about audio clips. My current Podcas diet has now swelled greatly - up until yesterday it was just the SMART Board Podcast. But I have now subscribed to a further five:

Here's three :

Reigniting my old dance music passion with Graham Gold's Podcast

Keeping up with the second best show on TV- The Apprentice

And Keeping up with the bets show on TV- DR WHO

This has all been very exciting, not just because I have found niche podcasts to download and view on my PC or Iriver for my own sad tastes, but because I have also discovered how some schools are using the medium. I am linking to one example below, because it is quite rough and ready and you get the feeling that the school is keen to pioneer with the medium.

Oh the school is Welsh by the way!!
http://cefnfforest.podomatic.com/

I am feeling as excited by podcasting as I did a few months ago about Photostory- it is certianly a medium I want to develop further with schools.

I guess most of you have seen the vidoe clip from teacher tube by now, but if not it gives a strong argument for the use of new technologies in the classroom.








And Finally..
Who can fail to be excited by the trailer for episodes 6-13 of Dr Who? available now -click here