Podcasting

I have long been an avid user of audio clips in my classroom, although I don't believe that any of them could be defined as "podcasts". Usually I will download e-books to play for students, or radio-play versions of short stories to pique the interest of my auditory learners. I suppose this leads me to the question, does a recording only become a podcast if it is  posted on the internet for all to listen to? Or can creating audio recordings be enough to claim podcasting in the classroom?



I ask this less than poignant question because, as a Drama/English teacher, recordings are things I have done on numerous occasions within the classroom. A typical assignment in Drama 9 is creating a radio drama, which some teachers do live, but I prefer to record. Through the creation of a radio drama, students learn voice acting and are able to use their creativity to generate sound effects. When I was a student we recorded our radio dramas on tape recorders, but nowadays, students use their iphones/ipods. While I always get my students to perform their final products in the classroom a.k.a play their recordings, I have never posted said recordings to the internet and thus believe myself to be a podcasting newb. It would be interesting to put these assignments on a website where parents could access them, or even better yet, have them linked on the school's homepage as a weekly "performance". And taking it even one step further, how cool would podcasts be to advertise an upcoming play! I'm excited already!

Photo courtesy of torontoist.com



Other ideas for using student created podcasts in the classroom are for character interviews in English, dramatic readings of poems or short stories (with sound effects included), or as a tool for extremely introverted students to deliver their speeches or classroom presentations. But, again, can't these just be done as recordings and not podcasts?

Anyway, as I thought more and more about podcasts, I wasn't sure that I had ever really listened to one. Inspired by Richardson's itunes plug, I checked out the site's podcast collections and searched their list of education based recordings. I listened to a few, but didn't find anything that inspired me enough to subscribe, though the ability to do so is an amazing invention. I love that should I come across a podcast that I really like, that I can download it directly to my ipod each night so that it is ready for my morning commute. 

A screenshot of the Itunes Education Podcast page

In addition to Itunes, a great source for potentially educationally viable podcasts is CBC. A few which seemed like they could be handy in the classroom were The Debaters, to help model debating skills for students, The Vinyl cafe, when teaching short stories/ personal narrative writing (and because who doesn't love Stewart McLean?), and Writers and Company, for a creative writing class.

On my CBC search, I also realized that there are two podcasts that I have listened to on a semi-regular basis, not even realizing that that's what they were. I suppose that even though the sound was coming out of my computer, I still associated what I was hearing with radio. The casts I have frequented are R3-30 and Q: the podcast. When I was living in China, I needed my fix of current Canadian music and both of these podcasts came in handy. I used to play them when I was at home marking and felt as though it kept me somewhat in the loop while I was living abroad. Essentially R3-30 is a CBC radio 3 podcast which plays the week's 30 best indie hits. The Q is Jian Ghomeshi's radio show, where he talks about a variety of things Canadian, but with a concentration on music. It was cool to see that the CBC podcasts have a link where you can either choose to download them, or subscribe on iTunes, the later of which I have just done. I wish I had known that subscribing to podcasts was a thing while I was still living the ex-pat life.



The Radio 3 Podcast link on cbc.com





Anyway, enough of my jabbering on. After much avoidance and many a technical difficulty (apparently the microphone on my computer is broken...who knew?) I finally created my very own podcast. Having nothing to talk about (which is a rarity for me) I decided to focus on what I love in a podcast: music. I created a "My Top 5 Songs This Week" podcast, partially because I didn't want to talk to much, and also because I thought it would be a good way to practice integrating music into my cast. As a result, my podcast may break some copyright laws, but I kept the song clips short to hopefully avoid that issue.

I downloaded Audacity for my podcasting and found it extremely easy to use, much easier than Garage Band which I have played around with before. Because of the integration of music into my podcast I got to play around a lot with editing and special effects such as fading in and fading out so that the music didn't end abruptly. I really enjoyed planning and making my podcast especially because I got to be a DJ of sorts (a life-long dream of mine).

I was slightly frustrated when trying to get my mp3 file onto my blog, because apparently blogger doesn't allow you to import podcasts directly intro your blog page. While getting a Sound Cloud account was helpful, I am slowly getting annoyed by all of the random things I have signed up for at this point. Anyway, below is the link to my podcast, I hope it works.

Podcast

* it seems that to open my podcast link you have to right click and hit "open link"... not sure why

Social Bookmarking

As I was reading "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts..." by Will Richardson, I was immediately taken by his description of Diigo. Ideally I would like to give both Delicious and Diggo a whirl, but at the moment I just don't have the time to play around with both of them. What really struck me about Diigo is the highlight/sticky note function. As I was reading, uses for Diigo in the English classroom just kept popping into my head. The ability to post websites, or links to short stories/poems etc. with highlighted sentences, or extra information added through annotation seemed like an amazing close reading tool for the English classroom.

Unlike the other tools discussed in this class so far, I didn't find Diigo completely user friendly. I was quickly able to add my bookmarks (though only some, as I think transferring all of my stored information over will take quite some time) and found it easy to tag the bookmarks, name them and make them public or private. My next step was ordering them into "lists" which again, was simple.

Where I got lost was in how to use the highlighting/sticky note function. I tried searching the site/playing around on my own for a long time, but eventually I started feeling like that person who refuses to ask for directions when they are lost on a roadtrip. I finally sucumbed and checked the help section for clear instructions.

Once the help section taught me what to do it was so simple that I was kind of embarrassed that I hadn't figured it out on my own. But my problems continued, when I went to test out the highlighting function I actually found it really finicky to use. I am not sure if this is because I use the track pad on my laptop rather than an actual mouse, but I found it extremely difficult to highlight the words I wanted, and when I highlighted the wrong thing found it time consuming to erase.

On the page shown above, I wanted to highlight only the word Dublin, but found it impossible. What you see in the picture is what I kept getting. After a long while of trying to do what I wanted, I gave up (for now), but shall return in the future to conquer the beast. 

Unlike highlighting, the sticky note function was really easy to use and I liked how the notes shrunk down in such a way that they do not deter from the site itself if you don't want them to.

I only played around with Diigo for a few hours, and so far I like what I can do. I am excited to add more of my teacher resources to my account and to search for resources through the social bookmarking site.

However, something that does overwhelm me about Diigo is the amount of information it could potentially bombard you with, should you choose to actively utilize the tagging function. As of right now, I have left my bookmarks private simply because I am not yet ready to swin in the big sea with all of the experienced Diigo fishes. I have mentioned before that I can often find the internet to be an overwhelming place and this is not because of the technological aspect (that part is fine), I simply do not want to read site after site day after day. I have never been an information junkie, so I simply seek out information when I need it. I do see the advantages of having it brought to you, but I suppose I am just not there yet and perhaps never will be. Regardless of making my posts public or private, I am sure that when the time comes to search for information, Diigo will be a useful resource for me.

Video sharing

I began this week thinking, "Oh great, I have to sign up for another thing on the internet", but then I remembered that I already have a YouTube account. I had to wade through the emails in my inbox to figure out my login and password, but eventually I made it onto the site, and was able to sign in unscathed. Seemingly I have been a member since 2011, and only have one random video to show for it.

Proof of my YouTube membership

After I recovered my YouTube account, I decided to read chapter 8 of "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts..". I skipped the portions on podcasts knowing that we will be covering those later in the course, and headed straight for screencasting. This is something I have never done before, and I think that the educational opportunities are endless. You can create tutorials at home and make them available for students outside of classroom hours, how genius! I decided to try out Jing, the screencasting tool mentioned in the book and created the simple video below.

 

Using Jing was so incredibly easy, and the site has tons of "how to" videos to watch if you get stuck. My only issue with this program was that if you want to download the videos onto your desktop they save as swf files and are then seemingly impossible to upload into your blog. After lots of reading, trouble shooting and general frustration, I uploaded my video to screencast.com (the company that runs Jing) and then copied the html from that video into my blog, so that I could directly imbed the video rather than just posting a link. Uggh. I am getting annoyed again just writing that. Anyway, it seems that mp4 downloads are available through Jing, but for a small fee (which I am unwilling to pay at this time).

Jing is a great resource and one that I will definitely use in the future. I have actually heard of teachers (specifically within the Sciences and Maths) using similar programs to record their lectures. Students then watch the lectures for homework and are then able use class time to do the problems/questions/activities that are usually assigned for homework. This allows students to digest the lectures and then ask their teachers questions while they are actually doing their assignments. It seems to really make sense, though it is in theory, completely abolishing the typical classroom format.

Now, onto YouTube. Below is the video I uploaded to my account. It was created during my BEd and I edited it using IMovie. The song in the background is called "Plucky Daisy" by Kevin McDonald and is one of many free silent movie downloads available on the internet.

My You Tube Video

YouTube has long been my best friend in the classroom. I love to show videos to generate discussion, to teach students skills (specifically within drama) and on the smallest of occasions, just for fun. Now, I realize that some of what I have shown is copyright material, but this happens all the time in the classroom. Technically we aren't allowed to show movies of any kind to an "audience" the size of a classroom without paying royalties, yet movies are still shown.

Something I did struggle with in China in regards to YouTube videos was the fact that YouTube was blocked. This eliminated a major teaching resource for us educators, because some student's English language levels were so low, that instructing with videos was the best way for them to learn. What I ended up doing was downloading my YouTube videos with a website called http://www.keepvid.com I was a life saver and I was only able to access it/YouTube in China by using a VPN to change my computer's "location". This website also eliminates having uncomfortably inappropriate video links pop up along the side of the YouTube site, and also gets around the terrible internet speed/streaming which often exists in schools. This also helps if your school blocks YouTube, though it requires a level of preparation that not all of us are good at.

Something I am still wanting to check out is TeacherTube, a website I had not heard of until this class. From my brief visit earlier today, it seems relatively straight forward and an excellent resource, though I don't know how many of my own videos I would upload to it.

image c/o tumblr.com

Thoughts for the classroom:

Video sharing can be used in any classroom, but I can see myself using it largely in drama. I could get students to make and edit videos. I could teach them basic editing skills by creating my own Ping videos. We could then upload those videos to YouTube, or to our classroom blog for student/parent enjoyment (though I would make them private and disable commenting, for student protection purposes).

My only concern would be copyright infringement when students are making their own videos, should they use songs/clips/pictures from protected sources. It would also be nice to use a video sharing site to display scenes performed in drama class, but again, plays are protected and I am not sure if that would technically be breaking any laws.

As mentioned above, I like to use YouTube videos to teach certain dramatic skills such as mime, which I am terrible at. There is actually an instructional series on YouTube from a professional mime which I have used numerous times and find extremely effective. One of her videos is below.