Welcome back! I'm currently in Turkey with Nick Dennis presenting about technology to History educators at the request of EUROCLIO. Resources (in Turkish!) here...
In the extracts below (taken from the interview) I explain my belief that productivity is a learned behaviour based upon serenity, reliability and focus.
David Noble (@parslad), a Scottish educator with a long track record of innovative and supportive blogging and podcasting, interviewed me last month. David’s one of the founding members of EdTechRoundUp, so I’ve known him for a while. He too is doing an Ed.D. but hasn’t taken the easy route (as I have) and is actually doing some original research!
In this last part of the Podcasting guide, we’re going to convert our audio masterpiece to a format suitable for mobile audio players and the Internet, and make it available as a podcast! This will involve 3 steps:
1. Converting your audio to MP3
2. Sending your MP3 file to your blog
3. Getting your students/colleagues to subscribe to your podcast
In the last session we set up a blog and learned what RSS was. Let’s just remind ourselves of what podcasting is, shall we?
So podcasting is when you deliver audio files to ’subscribers’ automatically using an RSS feed. This RSS feed is generated automatically by the Posterous-powered blog you set up in Step 1.
In this session we’re going to be using a program called Audacity. This is available for all platforms – Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free and Open Source software. Audacity is already installed on the computers we shall be using at school, but if you need to download it at home, you can find it here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Note: we will need a ‘plugin’ for Audacity to be able to export to MP3 format, but we’ll leave that for next session!
When you save your audio, just save it as a WAV file. We’ll work on exporting to MP3 next time. If you’re looking for music that you can legally and safely use in your podcasts, check out the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page for ‘Podsafe’.
Over the next three weeks, staff e-learning sessions will focus on getting started with podcasting. This first session starts off with the basics you will need as a teacher before even pressing that ‘record’ button:
The easiest way to get your head around what RSS is and how it means that audio files can be delivered to interested parties automatically is by watching this excellent explanatory video prepared by CommonCraft:
A podcast differs from simply placing an audio file on the Internet because of RSS. It means that new content can be ‘pushed’ to interested parties rather than them having to manually check for updates. The process of interested parties requesting that podcasts are delivered automatically is known as ’subscribing’.
Now that you know what RSS is, you need to have a mechanism by which you can generate one. In our case, this is going to be a blog. Anything that you add to a blog post will be automagically turned into a subscribable podcast.
If you want to jump ahead and have a go podcasting before the next session, you should visit the Box of Tricks website where José Picardo has put together an excellent short presentation entitled Podcasting in Five Easy Steps.
I’m delighted to be able to invite everyone in the edublogosphere to a special EdTechRoundup meeting this Sunday (6th July) at 8pm BST (your local time here). As usual we’ll be rounding up what we’ve found useful in the world of educational technology, but we also have a special guest!
Mike Jones, Divisional Director of Core Projects & Technologies (UK) Ltd. shall be joining us. If you remember, a couple of weeks ago there were some issues surrounding comments I made about their VLE product TALMOS. Mike shall be giving the other side of the story and helping us get at whether there is (or should be) a personal/professional divide.
Sinclair Mackenzie and I are proud to present the next podcast under the auspices of EdTechRoundup. For those who don’t know, we’re a group of UK-based educators interested in the potential of educational technology to enhance teaching and learning. We’re a diverse bunch and anyone’s welcome to join us. There’s more details at our wiki – do feel free to join us on Sunday nights from 8-9.30pm!
EdTechRoundup podcast episode 4 is all about Internet Safety and features Ollie Bray – the man, the myth, the legend. He’s doing some great things up in Scotland that you really should hear about. So head over to the post to get the links and subscribe to the RSS feed, or just listen to us by clicking below!
Oh, and that absolutely rocking music at the start and end is the magnificent guitar solo from Muse’s Knights of Cydonia. Of course.
I’m delighted to announce that (eventually!) EdTechRoundup Podcast Episode 3 is now available for your listening pleasure. It’s around 33 minutes long and is centered around a conversation about the merits of blogs vs. wikis I had with Kristian Still.
The quality music inbetween sections is taken from the first few seconds of Justice’s One Minute To Midnight.
Not only does he, rather surprisingly, have a passion for all things geek-like (see this post on Linux and the Asus eee for example) but he’s now doing podcasts – or Podgrams as he calls them…
As Dave Stacey has already said, I think by now every educator worth his or her salt has seen the excellent TED Talks video where Sir Ken Robinson talks about creativity. If not, click here post haste and watch it!
Sir Ken recently agreed to be interviewed by the pupil-powered Radiowaves about creativity in education. It’s certainly worth watching/listening to:
I was interviewed last week by Tim Bradburn of Connected Teaching (@cpd4teachers) who was interested in having me expand up the ideas contained in #uppingyourgame: an educator’s guide to productivity.
#uppingyourgame: Serenity: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
I’m delighted to be able to invite everyone in the edublogosphere to a special 
If you haven’t come across 