The two students interviewed him, and it went really well. D. did a GREAT job of talking to him and expanding questions when he needed to. Afterwards, Peggy Ekster came in to participate in a Q and A session with Dr. Cain. My students were AWESOME! They asked some great questions. I was so proud of them, and it was really nice to see Dr. Cain interact with the students. It just seemed like it was the bright point of his day.

They were so excited and invigorated by the whole experience that they want to interview Dr. Collins, a previous superintendent who is well known and loved in the district. I can hardly keep up with all of the projects they want to accomplish!

I am so angry with myself – I signed up for a MovieMaker class on Friday and totally forgot all about it on Saturday until I got the e-mail that I “failed” the course. I thought it was NEXT week. I really needed this for using the movies that we would make in class with Starboard and the Audacity files that we would record to explain the material. Grr. I guess I can try to figure it out myself – it seems pretty easy. I bet I could do it with our AL subscription.

One of my new students is ESL, so I’m *really* excited about having her in class. This could start to be that element that Aspiazu was hoping for – the ESL element. We can have bilingual podcasts now!

It was much, much shorter than I had anticipated (again, from lack of effort rather than lack of content), and so the students working on the podcast decided to condense it from a series to just one episode. Sigh.

I took three students who really had an interest in the class to work on it while the rest of the class worked on a script that I borrowed from the Apple conference so they could get practice working with the programs. They did most of the editing on it, and I have to say they did a pretty excellent job.

It was finished yesterday and I sent it over to the superintendent since we interviewed him for the project. I also stopped by Ann McMullan’s office who just happens to be the Executive Director of Educational Technology for the district. Even with the mistakes, she was impressed with what we did. We have finals next week, so I’m struggling with grades right now, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll upload the file here.

I also need to get with the program and create a final exam podcast. This time, I’ll break them down into episodes. Wish me luck!

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!