KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

Actually, it was a bright and sunny Saturday morning when Stacey and I attended a district staff development symposium on podcasting. It was here that we developed the idea of writing a podcasting grant for the Klein Education Foundation. While I had never personally podcasted, I had downloaded plenty of pod and vodcasts on my iPod. How hard could it be?

We decided to write a grant for a Alesis Multimix 12 USB Mixer, Shure KSM32 Professional Broadcast Microphone, Digidesign Mbox 2 USB Audio Interface, and an extra Nady SCM1000 SCM Series Microphone. This was my first experience with grant writing and I was very nervous even though I was confident in the grant itself.

When I turned the grant in, I was reminded of when I was an undergraduate student taking a test. I knew I was prepared, I knew the material, and I thought that I did really well, but it isn’t until you actually get the graded test back (or, in our case, the grant proposal) that you find out the truth.

The truth revealed itself on Friday, April 25th when the Celebration Express showed up on campus. I was in the middle of class, helping my students with a project over Othello. I was in the middle of second period when I heard a loud cheering down the hall. No big deal - there is always some project going on at Vistas that involves cheering and noise, but this was different. For one, the cheering didn’t stop. It just kept going and going. And secondly, you could definitely hear the distinct sound of noisemakers.

Even at this point, I tried to keep my excitement to a minimum. I didn’t want to assume that this noisy racket was for KleinPod, but the students could see the huge smile on my face. I poked my head out of the window and saw the huge crowd at the end of the hall that included the superintendent, my principal, the district technology gurus, and huge crowd of important looking people whom I didn’t recognize, including a clown with a bicycle horn. Other teachers were standing out in the hallways with their classes, but I was still trying to maintain some sense of teacher dignity. I tried to keep my students working on their projects at their desks, but it was to no avail. They revolted and left the room to investigate the noise and the clown, and were quite shocked when Stacey and I started recieving hugs. It was then that I finally accepted it – we had just won a grant. I jumped up and down out of excitement.

SHW Group representatives were there to present Stacey and I with the check, and I vaguely remember answering questions about the grant and the educational value of podcasting. The “big check” was placed in the front of the school, and I spent the rest of the day thanking people and explaining the grant.

We have so many ideas and there is so much enthusiasm and support in the district for this project that I can hardly wait for the equipment to come in so I can start to familarize myself with it.