KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

I signed up for a wiki. It isn’t much now, because I plan on having the students maintain it.

I haven’t been up to school all last week, so I think I’ll pop in tomorrow just to check in and see if the mics have come in yet. and to do a little school work. I want to see how the RSS feed is going to work with our LMS system.

The students come back to school on August 25th. I’d like to have some podcasts ready for them. Start out with something small, something interesting. After listening to sample podcasts that are out there, I don’t want anything boring. I listened to one classroom podcast that ended up being students recording themselves reading a paper. While I can see the educational benefit in that (I use PVC pipes that I turned into WhisperPhones), it was very tedious to listen to.  I think this will ultimately makes my students better writers because they will be forced to write interesting leads and trim unnecessary detail.

I had never really thought about the timing of the grant, but I am glad that I applied in the spring rather than in the fall for this sort of project. I have time in the summer before school starts to learn and prepare. I learned a lot writing this grant, and I think that I will take application date into consideration when I write my next grant.

After being told that contradictory stories about the shipping status of the missing microphones, Peggy finally got to the bottom of the story: they are both back ordered.

Not “shipping first thing tomorrow”, not “delivered”, but “back ordered”.

I’m relieved, but I’m also a little skeptical – “back ordered” seems a little too convenient after the number of inquiry calls that have been made. I even checked the web page of each mic and nowhere on the page does it say that the item is back ordered.

 Hopefully they’ll be in soon.

The Good: After days of pounding heads, searching help forums on-line, and even (gasp) watching the tutorial video, Derek and Micheal discovered one of our problems: we had the speakers connected to the computer and not the M Box. Problem fixed and everything seems to be working just fine now. Monday’s goal will be how to save a file with a workable extension (we can’t seem to save them as wav’s or mp3’s) and the best way to publish them.

The Bad: We still have not gotten our microphones. I called the company again and was told that the items were delivered. After a little more investigating, it turns out that they weren’t. Or, if they were, they weren’t labeled appropriately. What bothers me the most is after I got off the phone the second time with the company, I realized that I was given conflicting information/

6/23 – I called about the mics. One mic was being shipping first thing tomorrow morning (6/24) and I did not hear back about the second mic (I think they called the school’s main number which is being answered during the summer).

The next time I called, “Eric” looked up the tracking number and said that they were both delivered on the same day: 6/13.

Wait, what?

Is this the same mic that wasn’t even getting shipped until the 24th?

The other bothersome thing about the company is that they open at 9:00 Pacific time, so that means that I have to wait until 11:00 *my* time before I can get an answer.

I think we are all getting a little anxious now, and Peggy has decided to call the company herself.

The Ugly: I have a few pictures that I’d like to post, but I keep forgetting to download them from the camera. I also have a few sample videos from the camcorder as well, but I am not even going to mess with that until I feel comfortable with the audio.

Stacey’s working on lesson plans, which is good, because at this point, I think I’d go overboard with pre-learning and vocabulary (probably just because I’m feeling a little insecure and intimidated, but I am confident that I’ll be ready to go by the end of the month).

I had another meeting with Peggy and Julie yesterday, and I left in such good spirits. I really didn’t know what to expect when I realized that I’d need to be in such close communication with the front office. Would our goals conflict? Would this be considered a priority? Would they see this project as innovative as I think it is?

After yesterday’s meeting, all fears have been calmed. It was so invigorating watching them get excited about the project! Of course I’m excited, but it’s validating when other people can see the possibilities as well. It’s amazing to see all of the ideas that other people have that I would have never even imagined. It’s incredible.

I’m the first one to admit that “knowledge of Excel” will never be a bullet point on any of my résumés, but after playing around with Eduphoria today, I (with help from Breanna and Gregg, that is) exported the school’s TAKS data to an Excel spreadsheet, figured out a way to color code scores, and wrote a script to organize the data by color coding. I am going to focus mainly on the first time test takers. I color coded the scores thusly:

• score over 2200 = green (strong pass)
• 2100 – 2199 = pink (passed, but might not pass the Exit test)
• 2000-2099 = yellow (failed, but is close)
• 1999 and under = blue

Obviously, this is not a scientific method of organization, but with so few students, I had to give myself a broad enough range to identify who would benefit from this pilot.

This is starting to be a time-consuming process. I was up here two days last week to play with the equipment and talk to Derek. I was up here yesterday from around 8:00 to 3:00 and I’m estimating that today is going to look the same. But I’m with Stacey and Peggy brainstorming and it’s a very energetic, creative process. I love it!

Still no mic – I need to call the company and see where they are. Stacey brought up one of her own mics today so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to play around today. If we get anything, we’ll post it up here.