KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

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.