In working with teachers, my goal is to make them so comfortable with the skills needed to create products that they feel like they can, in turn, lead their students through similar activities in their own classrooms. My job is to create a technology climate that fosters confidence and enthusiasm. That’s the kind of learning environment that makes teachers want to teach and students want to learn.
Near the end of school, I was showing a teacher some podcasting resources and she said, “I had been planning on retiring soon. With all these wonderful resources, I may want to stay a while longer.” Wow. At this point in the school year when fatigue sets in at about the same time SOL testing rears its ugly head, that isn’t a statement I was expecting to hear from any teacher. As a technology trainer, this is surely sweet music to my ears. And the motivation I needed to figure out how to make this work for our classroom teachers.
So, this was my task. To figure out how to make this technology, podcasting, relevant, easy, and inviting to teachers and, ultimately, to their students. If those simple examples I showed that teacher could make a person second-guess retirement decisions, that just may be a pretty clear signal that there exists some potential here.
My first step was to create a podcast myself. I only had a vague idea of what to do but technology doesn’t scare me so I went to my trusty “let’s-do-a-project” companion, our 11-year-old son Robbie, and asked him if he’d help me in this effort. I knew he’d have a good idea about content for the podcast and would be willing to do the audio. We were not sure what we were getting ourselves into but he agreed to help. And it didn’t take long for us both to recognize that this was something that was great fun.
In a nutshell, we needed voice and music. On his own, he decided that he’d write out his script so it would go smoothly (ahh … practicing a few word-processing skills AND doing some writing practice along the way … unintended bonuses!)
We fired up GarageBand, an Apple product that is fairly foreign to me. I have NO – NADA – ZIPPO musical ability so admittedly, this product has not been one that has been calling my name. But, I had an inkling that it might be the right tool for this situation where I wanted spoken voice recording and a musical track underneath. And, to my surprise, it had a “Podcast” template set up and ready to go. That’s really good.
We experimented with the internal mic built into my laptop but that did not produce nearly the quality we got out of hooking up a simple USB mic into the laptop. The process was pretty straightforward – choose the track onto which you want to record, push the record button, talk, stop, and the voice recording is done. We decided to do ours in three segments. It was easier to do this in small chunks rather than trying to do ALL the speaking at once. I’d recommend that in most all situations. If you mess up, you don’t have to continually start all over from the beginning. Then, too, when you have your music underneath, you can move the voice to better match the music.
The music tracks in a podcast are called “jingles.” Those can be found all over the place to download (be sure to get ones that are free to use) but in fact, any sort of music will do. Drag-and-drop the clip into the jingles track. That’s it. You can export it to iTunes. If you don’t want to put your podcast on a webpage, your project could be called complete at this point. You could easily listen to it in iTunes or (hence, the name PODcasting) listen to it on your iPod.
I decided to pursue a prettier interface to host this clip.
In considering that Apple is making podcasting something that is supposed to be easy in the mainstream market, why not give this new product, iWeb, a try? It is on my laptop and I had read somewhere that this was the tool I needed. I sure hoped so. I had no idea how to make this all work if doing it by hand in Dreamweaver – or even if it was possible to create a podcast in Dreamweaver without some other sort of tool. I only knew enough to understand that there’s some definite heavy-duty technical stuff going on in the background when you make such a web page and somehow, this didn’t seem appealing if I had to dump a heavy load of technical mumbo-jumbo on teachers. So, I opened iWeb. Oh, my. Templates. A podcast template. That is really, really good. Template-driven, it took about 5 minutes to make something that would work. Granted, I did take a few minutes to edit some pics but that didn’t HAVE to be done. Drag and drop. Use publish. Done.
This journal entry isn’t intended to be an instructional piece. It IS easy but I do need to provide a few additional step-by-step details to feel good about calling it such. That’s for another day – soon.
The look on Robbie’s face when we finished the project was priceless. He was truly excited, pleased, and even impressed about what we could do so easily, so quickly. Kids love to publish. And to marry their voices with cool music (and even pics and perhaps even video, if we wanted to do this at some point) is totally motivating to them. I plopped this on a web server and sent out the link for a few teachers and colleagues to view. And I spent a few moments in one of those teacher’s rooms the next morning following her immediate response which read, “How can I do this with my kids???” Music to my ears.
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