Tag: podcast

GF Podcasters

I have been spending a great deal of time in K-12 computer labs and classrooms this past month. It would be great if I could claim I was making a conscious attempt to get a better view of what goes on in the learning environments I often write about. While it works out in this way, I am primarily in Twining Middle School two days a week because I must move Cindy and her equipment around. Cindy broke her leg during the holiday season and can now neither walk nor drive. So – I either push the wheel chair or carry the bags.

Today was T-Rex day at Twining school. I never did figure out what T-Rex stands for. I am guessing the reference is to a dinosaur, but the mascot is the Thunderbird. This is a special events day during which the students get to select from among several “special” recreational/learning activities. Some left early this morning in the below 0 temperature and wind to ski. Some went to a water park. Some stayed in the school for a variety of activities including podcasting, art projects, and rocket building.

Cindy worked with elementary school children to help them create simple podcasts in KidPix. We have been around KidPix a long time and like so many products you have to pay attention because the companies keep adding new features. A recent option allows the slideshow created from individual images to be exported as an “enhanced podcast.” You hear the audio associated with each image (I guess you could call this the podcast part) and see the images, animated embellishments, etc. matched to the audio (this is the enhanced part).

T-Rex Day

I have also been waiting for a chance to provide a link to the weekly podcasts generated by Deb Canton’s sixth graders. Deb works with curriculum technologhy partner Carla Haaven to orchestrate a process by which a rotating set of three students generates a weekly one-minute podcast. The students have from Monday through Wednesday to generate a script related to an event or topic relevant to the class (a list of possible topics is kept on the board). Carla meets with the group on Wednesday (with a camera in case an image or two is needed) and they turn the script into a podcast with Garageband. Check a few of these out – the quality is great.

Canton Kid's

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A Picture About Several Thousand Words

One of my general frustrations with the individuals I consider the movers and shakers in the educ blog community is that they seldom collect or rely on research and data. Innovators trained in the tradition I come from have vision and beliefs just like anyone else, but we start to feel guilty when we promote practices without the benefit of some form of evidence. I hope this “built-in” guilt mechanism is a hedge against becoming too caught up in the thrill of being a promoter.

I decided when there was a connection to the general themes of this blog I would make an effort to share data I collect. Here is a simple finding that may be relevent to those interested in podcasting educational content.

A topic I study as a researcher is the impact of providing beginning college students “lecture supplements.” I consider such questions as –

  • Will students make voluntary use of lecture supplements?
  • What are the characteristics of students who use lecture supplements?
  • Is there a connection between the use of lecture supplements and attendance?
  • Etc.

I have been evaluating student use of lecture outlines (available before lectures) and lecture summaries for some time. For the past couple of years, I have added audio.

The following chart (a picture about student use of lecture resources – several thousand words) indicates the % of outlines, summaries, and audio files (from left to right) “downloaded” by students.

Yahoo Time Capsule

An impression – within the context of text-based resources, students are not that interested in audio content. Why – I am guessing the efficiency of lecture summaries is much greater and lecture summaries prepared by a qualified individual have been “preprocessed” and are more helpful as a supplement.

So – I still think there may be some specific opportunities for “podcast” content, but the DATA I have regarding represenations of entire lectures suggest that college students would prefer a quality text summary. When students are investing their time, students appear to prefer well written and complete information summaries. I am assuming there would be specific exceptions that would involve the unique capabilities of audio – language development, music, bird calls, etc. Perhaps a collaborative set of master notes generates by students via a wiki should be the focus of our attention.

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Podcasting Lectures – The Dilemma

SlashDot includes a post today that is concerned with the issue of podcasting lectures and the potential problem of absenteeism.

I had a personal reaction to the post that would likely be different from the reaction of many. I follow and contribute to a small literature on the positive and negative consequences of offering students online representations of lecture content (e.g., notes, audio). In this case, the “hard copy” literature associated with this issue probably predates and is more robust than the online discussion.

For example, a good deal of the “hard copy” consideration of making lecture resources available to students is grounded in an old literature that examines student limitations in note taking. The cognitive demands of taking notes may reduce the “processing of lecture content” AND “generate a poor account of the lecture” to review later. Alternative representations of a lecture (whether outlines, PowerPoint images offered to students, or podcasts) offer benefits by addressing such limitations OR by providing an alternative for students who missed class for “acceptable” reasons.

The SlashDot analysis mainly offers advice on mechanisms for assuring that students will still come to class and can access a podcost (e.g., a password distributed in class).

BTW – my research seems to indicate that students prefer “complete notes” (taken by a skilled note taker) to an online audio “transcript” of the lecture. This makes sense to me. A good set of notes can be read quickly and easily scanned for problem areas. In addition, online notes have been “preprocessed” by an “expert” student.

I do encourage you to read the comments associated with the SlashDot post.

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KidPix Podcast

One of my favorite software discoveries from NECC was MacKiev’s KidPix 3.x.

We go way back with KidPix. KidPix helped Cindy convince the school board that Macs (the LC) were the way to go when computers were first purchased for Grand Forks elementary classrooms. Our second grade daughter created a Kid Pix project (she colored a line art drawing of a dinosaur, recorded a song about dinosaurs, and typed in the lyrics of the song) as a demonstration. She entered the text as a something to do as the meeting progressed without our suggestion. At the time, it was a very impressive demonstration of multimedia authoring (we still include her “dinosaur project” image in the forward to our book).

We created a slide show before we knew what such things were called and before the feature was added to KidPix. The procedure was a little complicated – it required that KidPix pict files be attached to individual cards of a HyperCard stack, audio had to be extracted from the KidPix files (using Resedit) and added to the HyperCard stack, and the stack had to be activated by a script we hacked together and attached to each card so that stack the entire collection would automatically play. (I still miss HyperCard.)

I think KidPix got kind of buggy and there were some strange things going on with which company was actually upgrading and selling the product (I am still confused because you can purchase two versions).

I am an advocate again. We ran across a new KidPix feature at NECC (the MacKiev update to version 3) that we like. You can now export a KidPix slideshow as a podcast. I find the idea of second graders creating podcasts a little freaky, but why not.

A simple example (turn up the volume). This is playing as a Quicktime file (podcast size) within a web page – I thought this would be easier than sending as a podcast.

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iLife Podcasting

I like the new iLife ’06 suite. My latest experiment made use of Garageband to generate a podcast (focused on social bookmarking if you care to give a listen).

Garageband has a special podcasting “track”, allows images to be brought in from iPhoto as chapter art (see image below or the sample above), and publishes to iWeb or iTunes.
Library of Congress Workshop

Now, I need to work on my “fm” voice. There were some options for manipulating voice characteristics so I will have to experiment with sound quality next. It appears there are options for sounding mellow, but nothing available should I want to sound exciting.

EduBlog post on a similar topic.

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