In the spirit of owning my own data and keeping everyone up-to-date with when stuff is published elsewhere, this is a heads-up that Andy Stewart, co-kickstarter of Purpos/ed and I were interviewed by the Ed Tech Crew recently. We covered everything from Purpos/ed itself to my doctoral thesis and productivity.

Give it a listen! (Running time: 1 hour 25 mins. Size: 61.9 MB)

I’ve got a backup copy saved locally and have uploaded another to the Internet Archive for safekeeping (in case the link above goes down).

In the extracts below (taken from the interview) I explain my belief that productivity is a learned behaviour based upon serenity, reliability and focus.

(if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader you may need to click through!)

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!

Focusing on the question How are learning professionals dealing with the social web?, David’s podcasts can be found on his Booruch blog. You can listen to mine either on his blog or by clicking below.

Contents:

• My (professional) educational background
• My experiences of ICT-related training and professional development: as a student teacher, during INSET, and as part of CPD
• My previous workplaces and the level of web access availble learning professionals
• My notion of a ‘learning network’
• My uses of the social web
• Changes I anticipate in use of ICT over the next 3 years.

Before reading this, you should have gone through the steps indicated in these two posts:

• >> Podcasting: Step 1 – RSS and setting up a teacher blog
• >> Podcasting: Step 2 – Recording and editing your podcast

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

To get started, follow the guide below!

Read/act on this first:

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!

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we’ll be making use of the excellent video guides to using Audacity that can be found here: http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/17-audacity-tutorial.htm

1. The editing tools
2. Basic editing and trimming your audio
3. Importing audio and adding music to your podcast

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:

1. An understanding of what RSS is.
2. A blog onto which to put MP3 files.

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.

To learn how to set up a blog, check out the elearnr guide entitled:
Creating a homework blog in 3 simple steps using email

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.

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.

Do join us if you can!

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.

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…