The article lays out the following 10 tips to consider when entering the podcast medium:
1. Plan Accordingly.
2. Original Content.
3. Get to The Point.
4. Do Your Homework.
5. Consistency.
6. Timeless Content.
7. Articulate Words.
8. Optimize Podcasts.
9. Listener Expectations.
10. Archive.

All ten of the items listed are really worth considering when you begin to think about how you are going to produce your podcast. I am going to highlight just a few things that I think are really vital from my point of view:

Planning does actually save you time in the long run if done correctly. Planning how often you are going to produce is one of the more important things to think about. Your listeners are going to want to know when they can expect shows from you if they want to start and follow you. Give thought to how often you can plan and produce a show and let your listeners know your plans so they can plan to tune in again. This will help build listeners quickly.

Plan a format on how you will present your information with the understanding that CONTENT IS KING when it comes to podcasting. Understand that people are really savvy media consumers who have grown up in a “surfing environment”. If there is no interest in the message being presented, do not be offended if they “grab the remote” and surf to new content in search of a message that does. Take the time present things in a concise manner that “gets to the point” as point three states. Listeners are looking for how this information can improve their understanding of the topic.

If you have not produced a media program before, you may want to try storyboards as a way to organize your ideas. The old steps we learned in Language Arts of the writing process will serve you well you can find a more on story boards here:
http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/07/1000000107_f.pdf
http://www.sotherden.com/video101/storyboard.htm

Production quality does matter. Take the time to get a quality microphone and record in a quiet environment.

Podcasting is a very personal communication medium between you and the listener. As you begin your podcast, speak in a personal frame of mind. Speak as if you are speaking to one person and not as if you are presenting to a large group of people in an auditorium.

You can check out the link http://justwantinfo.com/article/10-tips-for-podcasting-success/.html to catch the content from their point of view, it is worth the read.

The gadget makers work very hard for us to believe that we need whatever the latest gadget is. Often people who are first adopters run out and buy to to try the latest and greatest. It is fun to have a new gadget to do things with, but these things start to add up and they start to take up a lot of space after a while, and that gadget is never within reach when I need it.

The booming application market for smart phones or the Ipod Touch deserves a closer look before one purchases a new gadget. Quite often you can find an app that allows you to accomplish what you were trying to do with the gadget. You can purchase it quickly and generally at less expense; and finally it is delievered to you with out incurring the expense of travel.

Has anyone started to look towards apps in this manner?

Everyone I have spoken to appears to agree with the concept that we should look at increasing our technology aptitude of our students, but that there is little time to do so under the current demands of the system as it stands. I.e. teaching, writing, etc. I think that we must look at several things in response to that argument:

1. The technology change is going on around us and will proceed with or WITHOUT us embracing it.
2. The assumption that all students will pick it up on their own in an efficient and effective manner is false.
3. This type of education subtracts from other meaningful things going on in the classroom.

The technology growth in communication and applications are growing at a rate that is almost beyond comprehension. That explosion in development is occurring because of the embrace of social media and the widening groups of developers that are creating application for needs that traditional company’s are not addressing. The traditional boundaries of communication as we know them are under global revision.

Students will embrace technology because they do not know a life without it. (see the Beloit College Mindset list as a frame of reference, http://tinyurl.com/5r4stp ) However, just because they embrace it does not mean that they understand all the implications and methods of implementation on a larger scale. That educational task can and should fall upon the educational institutions that engage that child.

This type of education does not have to take away from what meaningful education is currently going on in the classroom, it must augment it! Students will produce different types of products and create deeper understandings as a result of being challenged to create information through the use of these new tools.

The factor that I do not think is being considered strongly enough is that today’s students will be EXPECTED to embrace, address and use these mixtures of technology as a single tool and communicate broadly and in an effective manner. If educational institutions do not address this change, they are doing their students a tremendous disservice in being not being able to communicate in this new generation of communication; and in addition, they also do so at their own peril. Students will be able to use this new media format to seek out an educational format and delivery system that will meet their needs and desires. Based upon my discussion with teachers around N.E. Ohio, we are still trying to incorporate concepts into our educational settings that not advancing with the rate of change seen in the technology world. We are making a fatal error in judgment that we are the only game in town and that we cannot be replaced. Educational institutions by design do not embrace change quickly, research must be done and collaborated in order to change trends, colleagues must choose to engage with this new research and change current methods already in use.

That point standing, we as educators must look outside our classrooms and be sensitive to what is changing around us. In the words of Clay Shirk, in his June 2009 TED Talk: “…we are living through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history…” Mr. Shirk goes on to say that ” ..It is not when the shiny new tools show up that their use permeates society, it’s when everyone is able to take them for granted…” Many of the tools suggested in the 21st Century Tool kit have been around for almost 10 years and are no longer “shiny and new”, yet many classrooms treat them as if they are radically new ideas. We need to look at the 21st Century Took Kit as a means of both engaging our students and to prepare them to be effective communicators in the world they face.

Consider the following media in context with this discussion:

E08 Podcast: Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future http://tinyurl.com/kozkcc

I have continued to look at using podcasting in the classroom and for staff development within an organization and found there to be compelling evidence that this technology could improve student learning and communication as a whole. That said, the web has undergone a major transformation in social media within the last 24 months. Groups of people across many different demographic boundaries have embraced social media as a means of communication. This realm is no longer for the technology pioneer, it has reached critical mass for the general public.

For educators, I think the time has come to examine specific technology tools as being required for student learning in the classroom in conjunction with their class assignments. I am not proposing that we create another technology class where they learn this skill in isolation; in fact, I am maintaining the opposite approach. These tools would be used everyday within the classroom. Students should use these tools with the ease and fluency that they currently use a pencil. The focus should not be on the technology use itself; but rather, it should become on the quality and communication of ideas and thought processes that the student generates. As students become more comfortable with the technology, teachers could generally allow the student to pick the tool that best suites his method of communication.

It has been stated that a single week of the N.Y. Times contains more information than a single person was exposed to in their entire life during the 1800’s. The Industrial Revolution started our society on a path toward constant evolution and development. The technology race that has been started during the cold war has caused a society to evolve into one that is information based. The “Knowledge Base” of our society is in constant change and growing at an exponential rate. The skill a student needs to survive in this “Information Age” is not only their own personal knowledge base, but also how to search out AND communicate information broadly and effectively.

The Classroom Communication Tool Kit for 21st Century Learners

• Email = person to person communication

• Twitter = informal statements and questions on classroom topics to share with whole group. Examples: Announcement of blog posts, wiki posts

• Blog = formal writing and publishing

• Audio/video Podcast = multimedia formal publishing

• All of these materials can then be pulled into a class WIKI where it can be sorted, posted, search, and referenced.

It has been discussed in educational circles for many years that students should keep a portfolio of materials to document their progress across the duration of their learning. It would be valuable to be able to point out student progress at various times during their educational career. A portfolio would also serve as a documentation of accomplishments as the students move into different phases of their lives as well as a personal knowledge base to draw upon as required.

One of the largest problems with keeping this type of document is the amount of paper generated and the ability to quickly search that information as needed. Blogs and wikis serve this process by allowing keyword indexing as well as direct searching for text. I personally feel a wiki is the best possible tool for this job, whereas you can save several topics (subjects) of discussion and allow cross referencing of the information with posts of thoughts and notes. A wiki can serve as a personal knowledge base where a person can post and store a wide range of information that they feel they will need to have quick access to at another time. Wikis can be a little overwhelming for students to start with and blogs will allow much of the functions of search in a little more structured presentation.

Twitter or a micro-blogging format can serve many formats. If Micro-blogging is new to you, the format allows 140 characters per post. You must state your statement concisely. You can choose to use hyperlinks for articles, media or geo-tagging, but their use counts against your 140 character limit. Posters have taken to using services like Tiny URL to compress links into 25 character hyperlinks to allow more information to be communicated. Hash tags (#) can be used to allow searching of information at a later date.

Twitter’s real power comes from the network of people you choose to follow and whom choose to follow you. If you have a quality group of followers you can use Twitter as a quick link to information. The best quote I have seen states the following: “ Twitter users are to collective intelligence as individual firing of neurons are to the brain.” Taking the time to cultivate a well rounded network of people you follow can lead you to information you may not have found on your own.

Twitter also allows collective communication within work groups. Its classroom usage could be very powerful. Consider a classroom where the students are actually allowed to post tweets directed to classroom topics during class, and that information is collected by hash tag and reviewed by the teacher after class to be responded to. This response could come in the form of additional tweets or as a blog or wiki post. The important thing to consider is that ALL students would choose to follow the class account and could respond directly to the person asking the question. The “Knowledge Base” becomes a true collective of the group. Tweets are delivered in real time and can be searched in real time. Students could use Tiny URL to link information from their personal knowledge bases and blog/wiki posts for others to consume and in turn comment upon.

The real power of this type of documentation and communication toward the educational process would show in the strength of the student’s ideas. The ideas and questions presented would have to stand up to the scrutiny of not only their teacher, but their classmates, peers and the global audience as a well. I have sampled several different students at different grade levels this year, and all report that they would give their writing more time and effort if they knew it was to be posted on the Internet where anyone could see it.

As stated before, a major concern is the large amount of data that would be put together and keeping track of it. Teachers will need to learn new ways of dealing with electronic information so that they can quickly sort and sift student information.

RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication) allow the quick aggregation of various feeds of information. Flock of Tweets allows a teacher to create an RSS feeds from multiple Twitter accounts in order to quickly gain access to Tweets in a manageable form across selected student accounts. Tweets can be placed inside blogs and RSS feeds can be fed into blogs as well using widgets and java script without having to learn how to code the features yourself.

There are various ways you can combine RSS Feeds to allow combined consumption. You may wish to consider using this application RSS Voyage. ( http://tinyurl.com/o9pxg2) Using this service, teachers could take a RSS feed from every student blog and feed it to one address where they would be able to see student discussions in a chronological form. This same feed can be address to the class to allow them to access the class publications as a whole.

Writing skills are vital for communication; however, today’s society is now evolving to center around video as a form of communication. Visual communication is king right now. Statements like “A picture is worth 1000 words” are examples of society’s view of images and or video. It is only natural that writing skills should lead toward multimedia communication. It can also be very motivational for students who will desire to create in the format that is generally the one they consume the most.

Flip video recorders, mp3 players, and digital cameras all serve as a means to document and digitize data to allow its entrance into the electronic pathways for publication. Their price points have fallen to the point where they are affordable for general classroom use.

Students could and should be collecting information in a digital format about their experiences both in the classroom and outside of it such as field trips. One example of use could be that after a field trip, students should be able to create a presentation to discuss what was learned and how it was relevant to the discussions within class. This could be posted to a blog post and then shared among the class members.

This type of assignment should be a standard assignment after an outside experience. Students would know in advance they are responsible for documentation and presentation of their ideas. It would serve as a way to substantiate what the student gained by the experience and also encourage higher order thinking and reflection about the experience after the student returns to the school. Allowing the students to share out in a digital format would allow a quick exposure to the different perceptions of the experience within the classroom.

As time passes and students become more comfortable with digital publication, you should see a continued improvement on both the quality of the content and the quality of production because the students know that their ideas now have a global voice.

I would expect to see test scores and other types of tests improve due to the higher order thinking involved in producing a multi-media presentation and the broadening vocabulary they will be exposed to as global learners.

This post is ©2009 Mark Quinn All Rights Reserved.

This action represents a serious shift in policy funding for what has become the major funding for educational change in education dealing with technology. EETT funding has impacted the largest shift in teacher professional development in technology I have seen in my 18 years of education. This blog and the courses that it supports are a direct results of the impact that funding funding has provided. I am not compensated for this blog and run it at my own expense. I feel the topics and communication among teachers is vital to continue professional development and use in the classroom after the course or workshop.

The podcasting courses and workshops have trained over 350 teachers in the last two years on how to use Web 2.0 technology like podcasting and video casting in the classroom. Teachers have learned both where to find materials as well as to create their own customized materials for thier classrooms, in addition to recieving the equipment to use the training in the classroom. At least two school districts I have worked with in the last year have created curriculum for students and have enrolled students into production classes for this new technology.

A recent post on this blog discussed the reasons to give children a voice and ownership of their creative abilities and allow the to withstand the social critique of their productions. (http://tinyurl.com/pcv55z) Social Media tools like podcasting and video casting allow this very action to take place in a package that students are eager and excited to learn about. It is only natural that children will want to create in the media that surrounds them and the production costs associated with podcasting and video casting make it possible to do on a school districts limited budget and allows students to continue to use the technology after their introduction at school because it is affordable.

The introduction of the products like the Iphone are going to ensure that personal communication at the handset level is going to be a regular part of our student’s lives. Surveys are showing that mobile video and audio are increasing slowly but are going to become accepted ways of communication rather than the viral novilty it currently holds. (http://tinyurl.com/c86pyz) Continued cutting of technology funding that exposes our children to the tools of communication that are redefining our world are both short sided and dangerous to our advancement as a nation.

Taxpayers in the United States are paying taxes on every form of media consumption to support network access within our schools (http://tinyurl.com/oma35w). It seems a poor policy choice to provide the funding for the tools to allow access; and then cut the funding to train the very participants you wish to use those tools. Professional development for teachers has always the weakest link in educational policy because it is an easy target to cut when choices become challenging; while at the same time, demanding that new and innovative technology ideas are infused into our classrooms at every chance.

I urge President Obama’s Administration to reconsider this course of action and invite you to share your point of view in the comments as well as calling your elected officals to voice your concerns as you see them.

Dr. Harris speaks about four dimensions of expression in her article: Speaker, Idea, Contend/Focus, and structure. At the time of her writing, text and language art skills were mainly the focus of what the web could offer. Podcasting allows the literal expression of the speaker to covey content/focus and structure. With the addition of video to the equation, a content consumer can see as well as hear.

It is important to note that technology had not evolved for podcasting when Dr. Harris authored her article in 2002. It would take another four to five years for people to examine RSS feeds and see that audio and now video can be handled in that format. Now that the time has passed and technology has evolved, its time to push the concept spelled out in “Children Should Be Seen and Heard” to the next logical level.

I was asked to respond to the following prompt:
In any learning activity you conduct, how do you consider the four suggested dimensions of expression (the speaker, the idea, the content/focus, and the structure) in your classroom? How would include your students voices in a Web site project?

With the explosion of Web 2.0, the abilities that the web can offer truly seem endless. I have often stated in my podcasting workshops and academy that I believe “Technology has evolved to the point where communication is no longer limited by geographical boundaries; rather, communication is limited only in the ability to find a like minded audience.” Successful communication platforms like podcasting, blogging and recently the rise of social media concepts like Twitter are built upon the fundamental belief in my quote. The “listener” must choose to opt in to hear the content and will choose to “change the channel” if they are not interested.

Consider the power to impact a child’s educational development when they begin to have the power to broadcast their voice, content and points of view in terms of a global audience. Not only can students broadcast, but they can and will be judged on the quality of their four dimensions (either consciously or unconsciously) by their listening audience who then can choose to respond the student in nearly real time.

Students are very heavy media consumers. The mobile lifestyle that has emerged within the last few years has perpetuated student’s exposure to all types of media. The coming revolution in the mobile phone industry is going to insure that students will have no shortage of access to media and more and more often it will be on demand and in real time.

Podcasting should be examined within the confines of the school to allow students to broadcast their ideas, create content and develop an identity within the global discussion. It is no longer responsible to allow students to learn these skills in isolation or through personal interest. Students should be trained and be comfortable in this new environment. Students have a natural curiosity to want to create, and it is only logical that they will desire to create in the media formats they are exposed to as information sources.

Give children a voice and ownership of their creative abilities and allow the to withstand the social critique of their productions. Over the course of time students will refine and polish their work using the skills learned within the classroom because they desire to build their audience of their ideas.

Dr. Harris, thank you for allowing me access to your article and being able to reference it on this page.

Children Should Be Seen And Heard

I thought I would explore data to support my belief and I offer the following for your consideration on how big podcasting is becoming and its rate of growth over a period of time.

I used a tool in Google called “Google Trends” that allows you to look at the trends over time of searches on that search engine. I have created a graphic of the World vs. The State of Ohio.

If the searches for the term are any of indication of interest on the topic, you can see that Ohio caught the “podcasting wave” over a year later than the rest of the world; further investigation of the data shows that the largest interests center on the area of the US where the major technology centers or government are.

We also discssed the RSS (Really Simple Syndication), RSS feeds allow the subscription ability that impowers this technology. When you compare the searches of RSS vs Podcast we find that coastal population centers are still adopting this technology before the central parts of the US.

If you compare RSS vs podcasting in the US, you can see that searches for podcating have started to outstrip the searches for RSS. I think this can be attributed to the influence that Apple’s IPOD has had on the marketplace, and this makes sense as the portable players add a whole new demension of personal use to the RSS feeds. Also consider that purchasing an IPOD leads to a rather tangable, currently fashionable, product that you can do something with, whereas RSS can be obtained for free in most cases and is rather intangable on its concepts at first. You really have to live with the concept of RSS for a little while before the scope of ability that it allows comes fully into focus.

Podcasting is in its infancy and the automation of RSS has allowed many more people to start and begin to use the technology without having to be able to code the feeds. This allows people to begin to communicate on a topical or subject level and not just on a geographic level. People of all ages can begin to communicate directly with other like minded people all over the world in a media rich environment.

As the podcasting and RSS trend continues to grow the quality of content will begin to define what messages are heard and what messages are ignored. We discussed the concept that “Content is King” in the workshop. If a producer makes a program that does not interest an audence there is a wider selection of programming on all levels now for the listener and they can choose to ignore that content and search for something that does interest him on a global scale!

If you would like to see one way I am using RSS, follow this link and click on “menu” to see all the sites that are put at your finger tips. Click on the feed to select it and you will be presented with the most recent items. Best part is that if you wish to follow that feed, you can click on the RSS icon and follow all those materials yourself!!

Teacher who have taken the podcasting workshop or academy are invited to submit their feedback using the following survey. Please take a moment and take the survey. Results will be shared at the end of May!.

The general points of the discussion were Web 2.0 was basically allowing the viewer of the information to manipulate, interact, and add to the knowledge base rather than viewing static, read only web published materials. Examples on the Internet are abound and growing with social networking sites like: Myspace, Facebook, Livelink, and Youtube, just to name a few. Websites are including R.S.S. feeds at an explosive pace. The tide has turned, and people are no longer surfing sites to find information as much as directing sites to bring the information they want TO THEM when they are ready to view it.

Podcasting has a growing role in the Web 2.0 sphere of influence as you can produce an entire mulitimedia program using visuals and audio that can be consumed when and where the viewer chooses to do so and share with someone without being tethered to a computer to do so and people can leave feedback with the producer through many different ways. A second consideration is the entrance level of technology expertise and expense has never been lower to allow a single person to broadcast his point of view with a global audience.

The pace at which technology adoption is happening can no longer be ignored in the everyday classroom at almost any level of education. It is a common topic of dicussion in the podcasting workshop that teachers are feeling increasing pressure to become more familiar with how to use technology on a regular basis.

We are quicly coming to the close of the 2007-2008 school year with planning taking place on how we will begin the new year starting very soon. WVIZ and I have already started discussion on how the podcasting classes will develop in the next school year. I have also begun a podcast feed for my school over spring break to continue developmet of the students I taught Audacity to over the 3rd marking period.

I would like to start a dilogue on how others are planning to use the dynamics of Web 2.0′s interaction in planning for the next school year.