KleinPod: Podcasting in Klein ISD

After struggling with absentee students, technology problems, holidays, and just plain apathy, I finally have a rough draft of the Vistas podcast. It was turned in a final podcast, but I managed to find a few things that we need to edit. First, we have to have some lead time before the first student starts to talk, we need to turn the volume down on the sound, and we have another interview that we can add to the testimonial part.

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!

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?