Podcasting

A month or so ago, I did a short presentation for the Walled Lake Schools administrative staff. A summary of the Report and Mile Guide for 21^st Century Skills by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (http://www.21stcenturyskills.org) was given. The report says that today’s educational system faces irrelevance unless we bridge the gap between how students live and how they learn. To drive this point home, I shared a video that was created by Jacki Campbell, a friend of mine from Wayne RESA, titled “24 hours in the Life of a Digital Native.” The video featured a teenage boy sitting in a classroom at a desk, bored stiff, all throughout the school day. Contrastingly, when the dismissal school bell rang, he immediately began using digital equipment for various entertainment, social, and learning tasks. He used his cell phone, mp3 player, laptop, and video game system during the afternoon and evening hours. The video was hypothetical, but it proved a point – that there is a huge difference between how students live and how they learn in school. After seeing the video, the administrators had small group discussions about their thoughts and insights regarding what the video was implying about our schools.

One of the high school principals called me a few days later, to say that he had been thinking a lot about video. He expressed that it took him a few days to grapple with the content, but that he wanted to show the video to his entire staff, and then discuss strategies that could be done to help bridge the gap between how students live and how they are expected to learn in their school. He called me several times over the next two weeks with a new question, thought, or idea. He was particularly interested in podcasting, and was beginning to have informal conversations about podcasting with some of his teachers. Together, we planned an agenda for an upcoming staff meeting.

His inquiry and request came at a perfect time for me. I had been planning to start by own blog and dapple with podcasting for several months. His request nudged me to take action. I knew that I had to have first-hand experience with podcasting for two main reasons – to give myself credibility and to learn the procedures. I now know how to record audio, add a few seconds of music, convert the sound file to an mp3 file, create a blog that is not blocked by our school filter, write and edit entries in a blog, post mp3s on a blog, and create an RSS feed so folks can get updates using an aggregator. This all sounds so complicated, but it really isn’t. A podcast is really only a sound file that is posted on the Internet.

Although I very much look forward to presenting to the Walled Lake Western High School staff about all this, I know I need to focus more on the purposes and educational reasons for podcasting and blogging rather than the procedures. The desire to try something new for reasons that make sense to teachers will make learning the process less hard. I am anxious to hear their ideas of how podcasting might be helpful for students as they listen to teacher-created podcasts AND how it might be valuable for students to create their own podcasts on various topics they are learning about.

I also want to stress the incredible value of blogging and podcasting for a teacher's own learning. Experiencing this kind of learning with a network of people with similar interests should be the first step, I think. This is what I’ve been doing for several months, and I don’t think I would have the same understanding for the purpose and value of using podcasting as part of the educational process without having spent this time learning in this way myself.

If after the staff meeting a group of teachers is interested in exploring podcasting and blogging, I’d be delighted to work with them to coach and guide them as they get started. I have some ideas about how I would do that. Hopefully, I will share enough information at the staff meeting to make a few teachers curious about the next step. That is my goal.

Listen to this blog post as an mp3 audio file