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!

I placed my podcast posts on my teacher blog (http://vmiller@edublogs.org) and it all seems to work! I submitted the feed Room 118 to Podcast Alley and am going to try and submit the feed to iTunes later today.

I’m excited!

We made it through Hurricane Ike with little damage other than the eight days of school that we lost. For a school on an accelerated schedule, that much time lost is devastating. We finally went back to work last Wednesday and we have been playing catch up the entire time.

My original plan was to publish the podcasts on the district’s LMS site because they have an RSS feed, but we were having serious problems with LMS and Lightspeed the week before the hurricane, so I was never really able to post an RSS feed and see how the students responded to it. Luckily, any problems we had this past week have been short-lived and are usually solved if we restart Internet Explorer.

The best news is that I have created two podcasts for my students! One was going over the answers on a quiz that they took and the second was a test review! I’m so excited! I really hope it works, because at this point, it really saved me a lot of time in the classroom. This way, I also made sure that each class got the same material.

The problem that I’m facing now is publishing these RSS feeds. We are using LMS right now, but I can’t publish them to iTunesor Podcast Alley because I need a public forum to post on. I’m going to poke around on Edublogs and see what options are available. I am a little concerned about this, because Klein’s system does not seem to be very compatible with Edublogs. No one can get an e-mail from Edublogs! I’ll look into that, because I find this to be a very user-friendly site.

Looking back at previous posts today, I already feel months behind. I had wanted podcasts ready to go for the first day of school. Here it is, almost the end of our grading period, and I’m just starting to identify the kinks rather than solving the kinks.

At least my group of students is excited about the process. Right now, I feel like I’m leading them on because I haven’t really given them much podcasting. I’m working on the curriculum as we speak, but for now, I feel like I’m dragging the process out. The great news is that they all seem to be on board and eager. I think they feel special because they know they are involved in the pilot project for a grant. I won’t say that they are looking froward to TAKS testing reviews, because they aren’t, but when I explained my TAKS plan to them, they were agreeable. The students who still need to take TAKS are going to create specific tutorials for middle school students. Each student will create tutorials for the objective that she/he needs to pass.

I passed out the TAKS study guides yesterday. As I expected, they groaned and all told me to keep the book. I agreed to do so, but had them look at their TAKS objectives and pointed out to them what we’d be podcasting later on. I didn’t hear a single groan – in fact, they were asking me questions. I’mnot going to go so far and say they were excited about TAKS tutorials, but I think they are now looking at it in a new way. It was really what I needed to keep my head afloat after the past few weeks.

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.

I’m the first one to admit that “knowledge of Excel” will never be a bullet point on any of my résumés, but after playing around with Eduphoria today, I (with help from Breanna and Gregg, that is) exported the school’s TAKS data to an Excel spreadsheet, figured out a way to color code scores, and wrote a script to organize the data by color coding. I am going to focus mainly on the first time test takers. I color coded the scores thusly:

• score over 2200 = green (strong pass)
• 2100 – 2199 = pink (passed, but might not pass the Exit test)
• 2000-2099 = yellow (failed, but is close)
• 1999 and under = blue

Obviously, this is not a scientific method of organization, but with so few students, I had to give myself a broad enough range to identify who would benefit from this pilot.

This is starting to be a time-consuming process. I was up here two days last week to play with the equipment and talk to Derek. I was up here yesterday from around 8:00 to 3:00 and I’m estimating that today is going to look the same. But I’m with Stacey and Peggy brainstorming and it’s a very energetic, creative process. I love it!

Still no mic – I need to call the company and see where they are. Stacey brought up one of her own mics today so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to play around today. If we get anything, we’ll post it up here.

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!