KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

We are working on a podcast for a 7th grade class in the district – we are calling it Grammar Snob. I am learning that while I think it might be easy to talk about the difference between “their”, they’re”, and “there”, the students are finding it harder. I had to cut my time limit down from 2-3 minutes to about 45 seconds.

I think it’s because of lack of content rather my too high expectations. We’ll have to come back to this.

Also, I find that final drafts are much harder to come by. What I consider a rough draft is what the kids consider a final copy. That’s something that we will also revisit later.

I’m still trying to figure out a way to best publish these podcasts for a global audience. Any suggestions?

One of my first goals for this class was to be able to use pocasting in productive manner. We are in the process of creating a Vistas podcast that explains what the school is really about that we can hopefully use for recruitment purposes. It’s one thing to hear a teacher talk about the school and it’s a completely different thing to hear a student talk about it.

We are going to break it down into the following sections:
1. What is Vistas?
2. What kind of students go to Vistas
3. What does a typical classroom look like?
4. What does a typical day at Vistas look like?
5. My Vistas experience (personal stories about the school)

Each student has a partner, and will write about 1-2 minutes of information about the topic. They will all participate and write, but I will take volunteers for actual recording part.

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!

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.

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!

Well, yesterday, I forced my podcasting students to listen to a short “State of the School” podcast. We listened and we completed an evaluation rubric that I borrowed from Region IV’s podcasting in-service for teachers.

One thing that I learned from teaching writing is this: students love to find fault with other people’s products, and giving them a rubric gives them a chance to exercise this to the fullest. They weren’t overly mean, just creative in some of their responses.

They all decided that we could create a much more professional podcast that the one that we listened to. I think they saw it as a challenge. Hooray! The motivation is there!

A teachable moment today: The Klein ISD wikipedia page was edited with derogatory comments (with an especially stinging comment about Vistas) that was quickly changed back, but not before they were seen. I decided to use this to our advantage and pressed the idea that all of the materials that come out of our school need to be professional and appropriate so that we could shake the negative stereotypes that harangue our school (Wikipedia users are still debating on whether or not we are *actually* a school – The word “Program” throws them off.). This too, they took as a challenge and are eager to dispel any myths about the intelligence level on our campus.

The problem that I am now facing is the filter – nearly every page we try to access for example podcasts is categorized as “audio-visual” and is blocked. Podcasting is a pretty “audio-visual” field, so we are trying to figure out a way to allow access to appropriate sites. Copyright-free music and other sound files that we want to use are blocked, and it’s a pain to save on my home computer and transfer the files over to my school computer. It’s very hard to get the students to listen to podcasts that they aren’t interested in, and I can see why. It’s hard work.

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.

Now, I know that some will claim that it’s because I’m a Virgo, but I started doing a little more planning today. I think I have the basis for a great rubric for this pilot based on TAKS results.

We’d like to focus our podcasting on specific TAKS objectives that students are having trouble with. This will truly highlight how technology can integrate individualization in a classroom. When discussing TAKS results with Stacey, she mentioned that physics was the objective our students struggle with most on the science TAKS test.

I know very little about physics, but my friend and mentor, Mary Obenauf from Pasadena ISD, is a master physics teacher, especially when dealing with at-risk teenagers. I called her today to tell her how the grant was progressing, and then conversation turned to TAKS (as it always does with teachers). I mentioned what Stacey had said, and Mary made the suggestion that she guest teach for a day. Because of the distance between Pasadena and Klein, and because of the nontraditional schedule that we implemented at Vistas, I did not think that was feasible. Besides, Mary has so many toys and manipulatives for instruction that it would be hard to transport them all.

And then, it hit me.

I guess it takes a while once you get new technology to fully realize its potential, but I think I’m starting to realize it now. Why don’t Stacey and I vodcast Mary and the best practices that she uses successfully? Not only would she be able to share her techniques, she’d be able to share how she does it – projects like her hovercraft and magic circle formula.

I can’t remember the last time I was so excited over science!