KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

For whatever reason, my external hard drive does work on school computers. It works just fine on my laptop at home and my desktop at home. I’m still buying a new external hard drive, however. 320GB, baby! I figured that with all of the sound files I’ve been collection, I’ll need a bigger storage device eventually.

Today, my students used the LMS discussion board to listen to the musical selections that they chose last week. Each student found a copyright free song that they thought represented Vistas, and they uploaded it to the discussion board with their reasons for choosing it. They then had to listen to everyone else’s song and make a comment about each of them.

Thursday and Friday will be spent writing a script for their segment of the Getting to Know Vistas podcast. I plan on having them record on Monday and Tuesday. I still don’t know how I’ll set that up. I think that each group might need one full day working in the studio, so that means that I’ll have to come up with some kind of stations activitiy for next week.

1. Record the podcast and edit in the audio.
2. Fill out a Podcast Rubric for a peer’s podcast.
3. Blog about their experiences with podcasting so far.
4. ???
5. ???

I’ll figure something out. If you have any ideas, please post them! I am hoping that I can get the rest of my final exams figured out today, otherwise I’ll be doing a test review the traditional way. At least I have a back-up plan!

We are still working with PBWiki and the settings with Lightspeed. I will be a little frustrated if this site doesn’t go through – one of the main benefits I see in technology and this podcasting class is that we can connect with the community. The community doesn’t know much about us, and what they do know is often incorrect. Same thing with other educators in the district. I want the community to see how amazing the school is, and that we do learn, and that our students defy their expectations.

Ok, I admit it. I fully wanted to give the class a current event today and tell them to leave me alone so that I could get grading done. The end of the term is this week, and I have a huge back log of papers to grade. It was a bad day. My external hard drive died and with it died all of my material for my English IVA final review which I was going to podcast. I am still upset about it. I’m… devastated. It wasn’t just all of my podcasting material, but all of my school assignments as well. I adopted my personal hard drive for school use this year because there isn’t enough room on my school computer’s allocated space for all of my materials. At this point, it’s all gone. I’m desperate enough to pay someone to retrieve the information for me. Even if I do manage to save it, I’m not sure that I’ll get it back in enough time to record my review since the test is Friday.

For the test review, I have decided to keep the script format, but break it down into sections with commercials, just so I can give the kids a break. In the future, the kids will create their own commercials, but for now, I’m doing it. I had high hopes for this. I’ll update later when I know more.

The good news is that with or without a podcaster/podcatcher, my students are going to start working on the first *really real* podcast. It will be an informational series about our school. Each student has paired up with another student to work on a segment.

The segments are:
What is Vistas?
What kind of students go to Vistas?
What does a typical classroom at Vistas look like?
What does a typical day at Vistas look like?
My Vistas experiences – interview a graduate, a student, a parent, and someone who wants to come to Vistas.

They are so excited! And secretly, so am I!

We have a spare classroom that is only used for holdovers when we TAKS test, and Peggy is allowing us to use that as a recording studio instead of keeping our equipment in Derek’s office.

The kids are elated! A student stayed after school with me on Thursday to help me move everything around, and today, the students named the “studio” and decorated it with leftover posters. What they really want is a tag wall where everyone who works in the studio gets to sign the board. We decided to turn the bulletin board into a tag wall and when that’s full, we’ll use that a poster. We’ll also make our own posters since there aren’t many podcasting posters out there.

I am constantly amazed with the imagination and excitement of these students.

Sometimes in the course of a bust workday, you forgot to check things out thoroughly. You have the best of intentions, but as we all know, the best of intentions are easily way-laid by a rowdy class and a faculty meeting. Thank goodness we haven’t had a fire drill recently or else I’d never get caught up!

In any case, once I saw that students were allowed access to log-in to PBWiki, I assumed that all would be well. All but two were able to log-in today, but their screens looked nothing like mine. I had the pretty PBWiki coding in the background, with frames and images and fonts. The students saw scrambled text that looked like all formatting had been ripped from the page. Times New Roman was everywhere. The page was extremely hard to navigate, but we could figure things out. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful after I waited so long for the page to get unblocked that I didn’t want to complain. However, the students could not edit the wiki. It looked like the text field to type in text was blocked – students just saw a large white space. The weird thing is that they could make comments on the wiki – just not edit it.

Wikis are not a new concept. This is supposed to be a collaborative project that allows our school to communicate with the community. We want to be able to use this as a recruiting tool for the school to increase enrollment. I would like future classes to update the page.

I understand that we have to have precautions in place, but we have those precautions. I feel like I am at a standstill. I think I am just going to try and forge ahead doing what I can - I can’t wait any longer.

I think what I want to do is play around with editing music in Audacity and practice speaking into a microphone. I think that for most of my students, they are embarrassed to speak into a microphone not because they don’t like the sound of their voice, but because they don’t know how to speak into a mic! I know this because I’m guilty of this as well.

These are some of the pages that I am thinking of using with them:
http://www.d70toastmasters.org/pdfs/Microphones.PDF
http://www.bedroom-recording.com/ (Excellent site!)
http://blog.frogbody.com/frogblog/2006/02/notes_to_self_a.html
http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20050630164539429

Now, let’s see if those links work at school tomorrow.

Still haven’t heard anything from IT about software, but after the excitement of yesterday’s recording session, I felt like I needed to use that momentum.

Today, I had them search the one copyright free music site that our IT department allows: www.freeplaymusic.com. It’s good for background music, but it’s not easy to navigate and all of the music is instrumental. I had them find a song for four categories:

1. Vistas
2. Our podcasting class
3. TAKS
4. A song that represents them personally

They are really starting to get into this, and they are wanting to do so much more than I expected – they want to create a school radio show (rather than a school newspaper).

I never really thoght that the learning curve for this would be so… difficult. In most software applications that we use in school, I know the program. I can figure out how to do pretty anything that I need to use in class. PowerPoint, Inspiration, Word, even Publisher – I know. Podcasting, however, is not proving itself to be as easy as learning another Microsoft application. I actually have to ask the students for help.

Now, I’ve never been the “know-it-all teacher” who shies away from assignments that I am not comfortable teaching just so I can keep my “street rep” up with the students, but my lack of expertise with Audacity is really changing my perspective. I think it’s refreshing for the students to be able to teach the teacher. The students watch me learn and they watch the mistakes that I may. They were happy when I told them that I figured the program out last night and I was able to show off my work to them when they got to class. It’s weird, but they are more appreciative of what I am doing than my colleagues, perhaps because they understand how much effort I’m putting into this.

I have always told my students that whatever they do in the classroom, I’ll do the exact same thing. This way, I’ll understand what they are going through. It’s one thing for me to tell the students to find a song that represents them, but since I’ve done it myself, I can commiserate with them and give them real suggestions.

There is so much that I want to do for next year already – I need mics for the students, I need some kind of dedicated machine for podcasting with adequate storage for sound files, I need a product that I sound off a special effect at the push of a button instead of importing, and I have loads of software that the students are asking for (they get the idea of freeware!). I also think that I’ll need some new headphones for next year. I’d like each student to have his or her own personal headphones so that they don’t have to share.

We don’t even have one student podcast created yet and I’m already thinking about next year!

One more bit of good news – IT is going to push through the LAME file update for Audacity so that we don’t have to touch every students’ computer. Hooray!

After months(!) of talking about podcasting and the mixing board, I decided to do something with it. Honestly, I think it was when I was talking in class last week and a student asked me if I knew that Derek had an expensive looking sound board in his office. The student was referring the sound board that we had won with the grant. Ouch. So, to prove to the students that it was indeed OUR board, I rounded them all up and took them down to the conference room.

I started out with a plan: every student had a brief introduction that he or she wrote. We would record ourselves and then mash all of the files into one with a music introduction.

The plan didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped for. I am still pretty unfamiliar with the equipment, and a student had to find the power button for me. (It’s been one of those days!) The reverb was still turned on from the last time I played around with it, so I had to figure out how to turn it off. I was having problems with the volume. But most off all, I couldn’t get the boys to get their hands off it and sit down!

The machismo in the room was stifling! I had four boys shoulder to shoulder with me in the front of the tiny conference room, trying to touch buttons and talk into the microphone. After they settled down, things went better. I have a few students who are hestitant to talk on the microphone because they don’t like their voices, but I think since we all participated, myself included, things went ok. All of the students were very positive and encouraging to one another.

I just had each student introduce himself or herself, and talk about their goals for podcasting and how educators can use podcasting in the classroom.

The hard part about this is that since each student spoke differently, I have to edit each student’s recording independently. I’m going to try and do some sort of introduction and ending to tie it all together before I post it here as documentation.

It really worked out well. This time, I had all of the students in the “studio” as I call it now, so they all got to watch what was going on. Granted, this meant that some of them had nothing to do while waiting for others to record, so I do have a few noisy background moments. I know this isn’t ideal, but I wanted them to see the whole process. In a perfect world, I would have had the projector set up as well, but I just didn’t have the time to do that today.

Gregg has a wonderful idea today – what if I incorporated audio and started making my own Flash animations. In fact, I could even have the kids make Flash games for TAKS once I get it all figured out.

I have a feeling that I’ll be using Atomic Learning a lot more as the year progresses. And on that note, I think I’ll go look over the tutorials for Audacity and see what other programs they have.

I got notice that the Ed. Tech. Department is following up with the podcatching issue and that I’ll get more information in a day or two.

My wiki is currently still blocked. Looks like worst case scenario is that I’ll be doing all the grunt work and uploading the content. My students have been working so hard and they are really taking this seriously, so I’m going to give them their voice. I just don’t know when I’ll have time to do it. I barely have time to grade papers, let alone transfer information from the LMS wiki to a public wiki. Using the wiki as an editing tool is going brilliantly, however! Students are choosing whether or not they are good at editing for content or editing for mechanics, and I am letting them utilize their strengths. In fact, I may split the class into two groups and let them deal with the wiki that way.

I’m scared that this pilot isn’t going to accomplish all that I wanted it to accomplish, and it makes me wonder what I could have done differently this summer to prepare. I would have pushed harder for a podcaster to have been approved earlier, but I really don’t know all of the steps that are needed for that process.

I’m now three months into the school year and haven’t started anything yet. I have created my own ramshackle curriculum because there is nothing available and the people who have the material aren’t responding to e-mails.

I tried to go to NECC last summer since it was in San Antonio, but there was no money in the school budget and I did not personally have the money at the time. I even offered my services to one of the people who helped organize the event in order to help cut down on the conference costs, and even though I was initially met with support, I never heard anything further.

No one really seems to know what it is that I am doing, and I am starting to feel a little lonely. I’m worried that my name keeps coming up at meetings and that I’m being seen as a troublemaker. Peggy (my principal) keeps reassuring me that the reason that I am having so many roadblocks is because I’m utilizing technology in way that has never been utilized in Klein ISD, but I never realized that this would be so exhausting.

There was a Web 2.0 meeting yesterday in which the podcasting roadblocks were discussed, so I decided to head down to the Educational Technology department and see what was going on.

Mark, my usual contact, had taken half a day off, so I nosed myself into Rosemary’s office where she was talking with Melanie. They invited me to pull up a chair and tell them exactly what it was that was going on in the classroom.

We prioritized a list of needs and they are going to get back to me on Monday with some suggestions and guidelines for letting people know about problems when I encounter them.

The school wiki was unblocked today, but the log-in page is blocked, so the students still can’t log in to edit the wiki. I don’t think that will be too big of a hassle, so my main concern was that we need to get a podcatcher that the students can use. I suggested two options:
1. All students get (an edited?) version of iTunes, or
2. Each student gets a different product (iTunes, PodcastPickle, etc.) and tests it out so that we can make a decision on a standard product for the district.

Everyone seemed agreeable and happy, and I left the meeting happy.

I am SO glad that I decided to use the PBWiki instead of Wikispaces as I had originally planned. PBWiki allows the teacher to set the control level for students, so while my students can edit my wiki, they can’t join other wikis or create their own. That’s good, because while practicing with the LMS wiki today (it’s starting to work!), the students were already trying to figure out ways to use it to chat. I told them that there was no real reason to mess up the wiki to chat because I already had a chatboard for them. Once they realized that, they stopped clogging up the wiki with “DUDE! JOE IS AWESOME!” posts.

I shudder to think what would happen if they had free reign on Wikispaces.

Once again, I am so grateful that I am doing this with a small number of students.

It looks like we have one copyright-free web page that is now unblocked!

I went to the KISD’s college night tonight and found MediaTech Institute who seemed to be impressed with the grant. I think I may ask them to come out and talk to my students about their campus. How cool would that be!

Well, we are just about ready to start podcasting. We have spent a lot of time working on a wiki for the school, and I do want to finish that before we start working on the podcasting, but we keep having setbacks in that area as well.

1. Our LMS wiki is only viewable to our class, and we want a larger audience.

2. www.pbwiki.com is blocked for student use and while I have requested that the site be unblocked, I have not gotten a response just yet.

3. I decided for rough draft purposes, we could use the LMS wiki as an editing tool. I spent about 45 minutes working on topics when I realized that depending on what IP address the user logs into, you may or may not see the content. So, my students can’t work on the LMS wiki either. I could go back to the traditional way of editing, but they are so excited and motivated to use the technoogy that I feel like it would be a punitive measure to go back right now. Whoever heard about a class that’s actually excited to edit?

In other news, I have been trying to gather good podcasting resouces on the internet to use with my students. However, it is very hard to find podcasting resources when every web page that our filters places under the Audio/Visual category is blocked.

I am trying to find sites that have interesting and relevant podcasts, sites that have copyright-free music and sound effects, and sites that have specific information about copyright laws that affects podcasters. I really want to hit copyright law hard before we start podcasting because I think it’s something that the students really need. From anticipation guides, I have gathered that students think it’s ok to copy and share music that was not obtained off of a CD and that you can legally DOWNLOAD music but you can’t legally UPLOAD music. They were so convinced that they even attempted to find web resources that supported this claim.

In any case, I cannot access these resources. I fully understand that some music sites need to be blocked, but I feel that by blocking copyright-free web pages, we are encouraging students to illegaly share and downlaod music. As a 1:1 campus that uses Web 2.0 stategies, music and images are integral parts of our classroom tools.

I have asked for the desired links to be reconsidered, mentioned that this is for a grant, and even used links that were suggested by NetTrekker, the school safe search engine that our district pays for, but so far have been denied.

I suppose that if this issue is not solved by the end of the week, I can start out teaching the students how to use Audacity. Since I am not that familiar with it, I think I will ask Stephanie Green to come in and team teach with me that day. It will be a great time to show off Atomic Learning as well.

At least I always have a back-up plan!