Learning to make a Podcast...

This week, week 5, our application was to interview students and post a podcast from the interview. Each week, it seems, I learn more and more in this class. I was glad to get my feel with the world of blogging and the more I think about blogging and the more I do with it, the more I see ways I can and will use blogging in my teaching. The same goes for the wiki. By the time I got through the week's application, I had several ideas of how I will use wikis with my class. Not only that, I also have gotten brainwaves of how to utilize wikis to make our interdepartmental collaboration much better, more productive. In fact, this past week, I was able to present my ideas to the department during our weekly meeting.

My experience with the podcast has been no different. I have experience recording and editing. Now I will admit, my experience has never been recording students in the the classroom. I am not pleased at all with the audio quality of the recording. I am used to recording audio for video and that I will be doing things with later. In fact, I am used to having to rerecord and loop spoken dialogue in a very controlled setting. I guess that would be the first real lesson.

My experience here, however, goes way beyond the little issue of the recording. Since I didn't have to really learn anything here about editing the actual audio tracks, once I finished the mix and was ready to upload to the hosting site, my brain immediately began thinking of ways I could use this. I think I have envisioned more ways I will be able to use podcasting that even the blogging. I am so excited about the possibilities this holds for my class and my teaching.

Before listening to the interview itself, I think I should describe my class. I did a round table interview with four students from my third block class. This is a class made up of twenty students. Of those twenty, four are minorities. In this particular class, 60% of my students are female. This is a regular class, not an excellorated or honors class, however I have 9 students who take an excellerated or honors class in some other subject. As for technology, all my students said they have grown up with a television in home. Only two students said they do not have a computer or internet access at home. Three students do not own a cell phone. However, only 12 of my students said they do anything on the internet at home on a regular basis. Of the students who do not use the internet at home, they are not really using it in the classroom either, according to their responses to my survey.

Wow, what a great experience. True, doing the survey and looking into the demographics of the class that I can't see (i.e. technology use) was an eye opener. Beyond that, though, I have gotten the podcast bug. I can't wait to modify my class and start doing things with the podcast. I should send out a warning to my principal now, he will not know what to think of my class come next year.

The link to my podcast post is http://wesleyrogers.podbean.com/2010/02/06/week-5-application-technology-student-interview/