KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

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 was up at school for a few hours today, trying to work out the Audacity/Mbox issue with Derek, but it looks like this is going to take a little more research.  I’m just happy that we are finding this out now, and not when we have students in the classroom. We are also frustrated in our attempts to troubleshoot because we don’t have a microphone that is compatible with our technoogy. We have lots and lots of USB microphones, but there isn’t a single USB port on the mixer. Yes, it is high tech and professional (which was the goal), but is very limiting. At this point, I am very glad that we bought an extra mic. Note to self: Buy more mics.

Dr. A, the ESL and bilingual director for the district, was on campus today. I explained to him what it was we were doing on campus and invited him to have a look at the technology which led to a discussion of podcasting/vodcasting in the ESL classroom. Just by brainstorming with Dr. A today, I can see KleinPod becoming an intregral part of the ESL class. All four langauge arts skills are used in podcasting: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. How neat would it be for an ESL class to podcast their respective journeys? How powerful would it be for these podcasts to actually be used in English classes overseas?

Stacey, Peggy (my principal), and I brainstormed ideas for the pilot implementation today as well. I think I am really starting to see just how innovative this project is.

I love the smell of plastic wrap and new technology in the morning!

The only things we are still waiting on are the microphones, which we didn’t even end up needing today. This morning was an install day.

A bit of disappointing news – at first glance, it looked like Audacity and the Mbox are incompatible, but with further research, I think we can get it to work. We had just started troubleshooting right before we left campus for the day, but I think that I’ve found a solution. We are just going to have to test it out tomorrow when we get the equipment in front of us.

ProTools is the software that came with the hardware, and I have read some amazing reviews of the software. The only problem that I have with it is that we only have one license. That’s fine for now, but I envision every student having the ability to podcast, and we can’t do that with one license. So, at this point, it looks like we have three options:

1. Get Audacity to work.

2. Get DigiDesign to donate licenses for ProTools so we can use this on multiple computers,

3. Use ProTools with one podcasting workstation.

I think at this point the next step is to start networking with other successful educational podcast programs. I knw it sounds cliche’, but why reinvent the wheel?

It’s only the beginning of summer, yet I’m actually looking forward to getting back on campus tomorrow!