KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

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.