Peace in a Pod-cast?

My Heroes and Aspiring to be "The Voice"

Jian Ghomeshi: Host of Q (CBC radio)

If podcasting is the Web 2.0 offspring of radio broadcasts - the art of speaking and presenting ideas on airwaves now made digital and easily creatable by the masses - then it's a wonderful thing that radio has given us templates to work from. One of my broadcast heroes is Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio's Q. I rarely get to listen to the live broadcast due to scheduling, but I can follow what's happening in art, music and Canadian culture (pop and highbrow) thanks to the podcasts of the show. CBC is brilliant at providing high quality listening materials, even if they are often of an educational focus. What they do for me is provide me the template for how a good podcast should sound. While Jian Ghomeshi is brilliant at questioning and drawing thoughtful, entertaining questions from his guests (in part because he is a professional musician himself), Stuart McLean of the Vinyl Cafe on CBC Radio is legendary for his story-telling abilities. Each of these broadcasters (and professional podcasters by virtue of being on CBC) has a skill set I aspire to.

Learning How to Podcast

My first experiences with podcasting were disasters. I blame it entirely on the technology. OK, I blame it mostly on the technology and partly on my lack of testing the technology prior to bringing in the students. After all, everything on Web 2.0 is easy, right? This is what the websites and my technologically savvy friends assured me. Students wandered into my office looking for ...tape recorders and cassettes. I had a few dusty cassettes and some rather decrepit recorders - two to be exact. Old Bell & Howards, these clunky old beasts were. They worked. They just lacked microphones that had jacks the right size. It's all right, I assured the students. We can podcast. They looked at me blankly. I explained what my understanding of podcasting was: creating a recording on the web and posting it for others to listen to. Eyebrows were raised, excitement started to build and we set out in search of the program I had been told was really great: Audacity. It was already installed on our server and so it was available. I opened it and promptly panicked. There were too many symbols and commands that looked completely unfamiliar to me. This didn't look easy. I tried to find how to start a recording. Nothing looked obvious, so I headed to the help menu. Once I had figured out how to start, then we had to try some test recording. We were able to find a microphone with the right size jack and then began recording test samples. Nothing. We couldn't get voices to record. The students were frustrated. I was frustrated. I asked them to come back after break and I would have the problem figured out.
The solution was to go to Podomatic.com. This recording and hosting site was relatively new at this time and not as elaborate as it is today. There weren't samples of various podcasters and popularity ranking hadn't started at this time. It was easy to create an account and I was able to make a sample recording in a few short minutes that was successful both in sound and in uploading. When the students came back, we were able to record and upload so that the recording - a short "news" style presentation of information on a topic could be shared with their class. Unfortunately, when they went to present, the sound quality on the computer they were working with in the class was terrible - in part because of the age of the computers in our school at that time. Students were able to listen later, but it was a frustrating experience and it continues to be a challenge to podcast at school due to limitations of hardware. Older versions of Linux have proven to be difficult when working with third party software that isn't built into the server. Over time, the utility of open source software in improving particularly with the growth of Android based applications for cell phones.

In creating my own first podcast, I tried to take the advice of Kathy Schrock, working from a rubric to create a high quality product. I think as I went, I quickly discovered things I want to try and improve on. Podomatic still proves to be very easy to use and includes RSS feeds, followers, stats and can be upgraded, should podcasting become addicting. It will be interesting to try other formats like PodBean, as well.

It is interesting that Berger and Trexler closely follow the information about podcasting with an introduction to the similar, but visually appealing Voicethread. I find Voicethread to be much more useful educationally, because it starts with an artifact (an image) to discuss. Videos can be embedded as well, but primarily it is an opportunity to record thoughts and learning around images. This past summer, I had the opportunity to create a Voicethread for an illustrator analysis assignment. It was fun, easy to do and required me to really think about what I wanted the listening and viewing audience to focus on. In many ways, I see Voicethread as a much more compelling tool for elementary students and secondary students simply because the focus for the person listening is visual, with an audio supplementary. This method of presentation is likely to be more successful at imparting information, due to the use of two modalities(visual and auditory), as opposed to one (auditory)in traditional style podcasting. If one uses video podcasting, then the audience is even more likely to retain the message. http://bit.ly/9usIAj

One of the possible uses for podcasts in learning that had significant appeal to me as a mother, as well as a teacher, was mentioned by Fisher and Frey in "Preparing Students for Mastery of 21st Century Skills" from 21st century skills:Rethinking how students learn. By assigning podcasts as homework to supplement the work happening in class, teachers can encourage students to take ownership of their learning and explore their thinking with other students, possibly outside their own school. By accessing discussion boards, students can comment on their thinking and learning as well as engage critically with others on that common topic. While this would have to be monitored with younger students, with older students it moves learning beyond the walls of a building and into their lives. As a tool for communicating and sharing stories and ideas, podcasts, Voicethread and video podcasting allow students and educators the opportunity to share thoughtfully and creatively.

Note: The RSS feed to my podcast is located at the bottom of the site. Thanks!

Look what I found: social bookmarking for fun and education

Creative Commons license: retrieved from Flickr.com. Image by Christian Guthier.

Desire to Learn


I encountered social bookmarks about five years ago when I read about Delicious.com. I was intrigued by the idea of being able to mark a page or website and access it from anywhere. This was particularly important to me because I was constantly trying to remember sites I had bookmarked at home when I was at work or vice versa. I quickly set up an account and got started, but didn't use it nearly as frequently as I hoped. Technology was changing quickly and my flashdrive proved to be a useful way to save things I needed when shuttling between home and school. It certainly wasn't a "social" tool, as I was only using it for myself. I found myself rebuffed by my staff when offering to share or introduce them to this great tool. As a result, I didn't have a community that I could share with and I certainly didn't think anyone outside of my immediate school circle would want to visit the sites I was finding, because they were mostly related to the work of my colleagues or the work I was doing in the library or in the French as a Second Language class I taught.
Social bookmarking didn't really become useful to me until I took Joanne de Groot's Resources for Elementary and Secondary School Libraries course during the summer of 2010. As a class, we were sharing so many good sites and articles that social bookmarking became a truly useful process. It was interesting to see what people were reading beyond the class assignments and what sites were helping them in their professional work. Diigo was a required site for the course and I found it helpful, but not as familiar as Delicious. I followed Joanne's links, but didn't post any of my own. I loved that it could store images and notes, though. The potential for classroom use looked huge. Like all new things, it takes frequent practice to become familiar enough to enjoy a new tool. I think that Diigo could prove to be exceptionally useful for work in my school life, if not my personal life. One of the things that should be noted is that I don't tend to share things with friends because I don't have a large social circle. The work that I do as a community volunteer tends to be with older citizens who are not really involved with technology, so email is as complicated as I get with many people I socialize with. With my colleagues, this is beginning to change. I share much more than I used to, with both teacher librarians and with my school colleagues.
For this course, I've also picked up Evernote and have just started to explore the options available. I like that I can mark a whole page and have it show up when I'm in Evernote. However, I find many of the features similar to those in Zimbra (my district's web-based email and sharing tools program). In both of these programs, I can tag, share with colleagues and organize my notes and pages into shared notebooks. The bonus with Zimbra is that my email can be filed into "briefcases" which can be shared and I can then add notebooks and pages to the briefcases as well. I also like the fact that Zimbra has shared calendars which are linked to the email and briefcases, also. Evernote is useful, but not as useful for sharing as Zimbra can be. It may take more time to find the full benefits of Evernote for my teaching situation and perhaps it may not be as useful as other tools.

Passion for the New
As I searched for current information (blogs and articles) on social bookmarking tools, I was surprised that many of the articles and blog posts seemed to be older. Edubloggers have commented on Evernote recently, but not on other social bookmarking sites. Even a search through my school's database didn't find anything particularly useful beyond articles from 2006 that were specific to bookmarking sites. Perhaps these tools have become part of the larger collection of social tools used to organize and manage information, yet the function of folksonomies and taxonomies as demonstrated so wonderfully in the video "Information R/evolution," (as recommended by Berger and Trexler) is really the key to how these tools will be useful to students in the 21st Century. This is perhaps the hardest part for me to grasp, as sorting information into traditional categories is how my brain has worked for so long. I still default to keywords that make sense in a library setting when I am tagging. Students, on the other hand, could organize the information they find, in any number of ways that are personally useful, then share those tags with their friends and peers in ways that make sense to young adults. It makes the idea of the Dewey decimal system almost outdated. I am aware that some librarians are beginning to rethink the organization of shelves and this idea is intriguing. Does "The internet need a Dewey Decimal system?"  or are we moving the other way? Are the Dewey's Days Numbered? Information organization is clearly something we need to help students with. Will Richardson comments, "Managing all of that information is wholly different from managing the information streams most of us grew up with in the paper world. ...How do we find the most current reliable information? In many cases, we get that information not by mining Google, but by mining our networks..." (Richardson, 2010.) To create excellent information miners, we need to ensure that they're comfortable working in the collaborative environments of social bookmarking sites! Now to make sure I can tag along with the best of them.

Creative Commons license. Retrieved from Flickr. Image by Luc Legay