I am speaking and doing workshops this week at the WEMTA conference in Madison, Wisconsin.  I am posting a few of my resources and handouts here as way to extend the conversation beyond those attending my sessions.

First up is my workshop on Podcasting with Purpose (WEMTA Podcasting Handout (PDF) ) where we will be exploring the basics of podcasting, evaluating and assessing podcasts, and producing a podcast.  We’ll also be talking about logistics and getting parents on board (Podcasting Parent Information Letter ) with the process.

Here is the handout from my session on Podcasting for Success – Strategies, Activities and Ideas

The next winner in this round of awards is the Portable Radio Point of View podcast for their work in the “Editorial POV” genre.  This podcast comes from Nathan Toft and Jane Smith at A. Lorne Cassidy Elementary School in Stittsville, Ontario in Canada.  

This podcast is produced by two classes of 5th and 6th graders.  The 15-20 minute variety show showcases a wide range of interests, but its strength lies in its use of ‘point of view’ episodes in which students react to news or issues of interest to them.  The students develop arguments and present them collaboratively.   

You can check out their website here and subscribe to their podcast here.

The next category we are recognizing is the educator created “Study Guide or Learning Scaffolds”  This award recognizes a series of podcasts that are focused on helping students learn and or review content.  Our winner in this category is Brent Coley’s StudyCast from Tovishal Elementary School in Murrieta, California.

Brent provides his students (and many others outside his classroom) with a great resource for guided study.  His series shows how podcasting can help extend the classday and support at home learning.  It is also a wonderful model for other educators who want to leverage the power of podcasting.

You can subscribe to his podcast here and visit his website here.

The next category we would like to recognize is Professional Perspectives.   This category is designed to highlight an educator’s podcast that is designed to share their professional knowledge, perspective and ideas with their colleagues around the world.

The winner of this category is Steven Katz, from Country Day School in San JoseEscazu, Costa Rica.
Steve Katz has a simple goal — “to help teachers integrate technology in their classes, especially digital video and podcasting.”  His podcast provides solutions to problems and provide a structure for technology integration that is easy to follow.  His podcast, Teach with Video is a great example and a great resource.

Steve also has a book on teaching with video that provides even more ideas. You can subscribe to his podcast here and visit his website here.

This week I sat down with two soon to be podcasters Jarred and Dale, who also happen to be pre service educators at the University where I work. They have some great ideas for a new podcast and are getting very close to being ready to launch it. We decided to record our conversation about what they hope to accomplish, the plans they have made, and questions they are still working through. I think it is an interesting conversation that may help inform some of our own conversations about our podcasts or the shows we are helping our students develop.

 http://www.intelligenic.com/kidcast/shows/kidcast051.m4a

The details of a idea or the steps in a process are sometimes lost in our personal perspective. We make assumptions about what people know or how they will need to build upon foundational knowledge in order to really understand what we are presenting in our podcasts. This episode of Kidcast will explore some activities for developing sequence, priority, and articulation of detail.

• 10 Ten Lists as a way to develop our students’ ability to prioritize ideas
• When given a problem, explore cause and effect and support it with evidence, and suggest solutions
• Explaining a process with descriptive language and unassuming details
• Use scaffolds like Inspiration to offload ideas and arrange them visually to get the most effective sequence

http://www.intelligenic.com/kidcast/shows/kidcast49.m4a

A picture is worth a thousand words… let’s prove it! Learning to describe what we observe in depth is a valuable skill that is connected to seeing and thinking more deeply. This episode will provide you with another great podcasting activity that will develop descriptive observation in your students. We’ll use photographs to create a guided visual tour in GarageBand.

For more great podcasting activities and lesson ideas checkout KidCast: Podcasting in the Classroom and Kidcast: Creative Podcasting Activities, Strateigies, and Ideas from FTC Publishing.

http://www.intelligenic.com/kidcast/shows/kidcast046.m4a

I’m back.  Thank you to all of your who contacted me over the course of the past semester.  I appreciate all the encouragement and support that continues to fly my way.   Life is really great right now and I’m looking forward to publishing more shows, connecting with more of you, and branching our conversations out into new directions.

This episode focuses on a strategy for developing interview skills among students. Its called speed networking and can be used to help students learn to hear several perspectives and record them for use in an investigative podcast.

http://www.intelligenic.com/kidcast/shows/kidcast045.m4a

To purchase both Kidcast Books, visit FTC Publishing – be sure to tell them that Dan sent you!  Remember, everytime a book is sold my dog, Jamal, gets a treat!

This week’s show features an update on the KidCast Awards – we had over 150 submissions! These represent some really excellent work by teachers and students. I’m looking forward to sharing the results with you soon. Check back after May 15th for results.

This episode was recorded using Ubercaster, a full featured podcast studio that offers some great work flows and creative options for podcasters. It takes some serious horse power and a lot of preparation (which is actually a great thing!) Ubercasters gets you to think about podcasting as a performance as much as a production. You can download a demo at ubercaster.com

Mothers day is just around the corner, so I decided to throw in a little podsafe music, “Mother”, from Kevin Reeves.

There has been a bit of a backlash lately toward the iPod. I think most of it is drummed up media hype, but it is important to address these kinds of concerns by engaging administrators and teachers about how to address cheating and appropriate use through effective classroom management not knee jerk generalizations.

I end this episode with a sound seeing tour from Massacre Canyon in south west Nebraska. I love discovering cool little piece of history like this and it gave me an excellent change to bring out the iPod and do a soundseeing tour.

Listen – Subscribe

There is still time to get involved in the 2007 Kidcast Awards – plenty of entries have come in, but not in every category. Still looking for more drama and sound seeing tour entries.

Special thanks to our platinum sponsor Humble Daisy: makers of ProfCast. Our other sponsor is Atomic Learning. They are helping to bring this great contest together and are providing some great prizes! Including:

Student Prizes:

• a handsome trophy for the winner of each student category
• a single user license of ProfCast for each student winner’s classroom
• a copy of my book – Kidcast: Podcasting in the Classroom

Teacher Prizes:

• a handsome trophy for the winner of each teacher category
• a 500 seat license of ProfCast for each teacher winner’s school
• a copy of my book – Kidcast: Podcasting in the Classroom
• the winner in the professional development category will also get a one year subscription to Atomic Learning.

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It’s a very exciting time…watching all this great work fly in…knowing all the creative and constructive energy that goes into it. Thank you to all the vangards out there who are making podcasting happen in your classrooms.
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The 2nd Edition of KidCast Podcasting in the Classroom….FINISHED IT!
- GarageBand’s Podcasting Studio
- Video Podcasting (including Video Cue Pro)
- more ideas about student voice and the fundamentals of podcasting
-It is available online at ftcpublishing.com – they have some great bundles – and they can even sell your district a license so that you can reproduce it for staff development within your district.

CURRENTLY working on a companion to that book that is a resource and activity book for classroom podcasts – it has over 50 ideas, strategies and Activities “KidCast: Creative Podcasting” – Look for this title out later this spring.

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I went down to Florida last week to speak on a panel at the Technology and Learning, Tech Forum 2007 Orlando. I spoke with David Warlick and Ginger Jewell about new technologies that are changing education. We took a really fun round robin approach to chiming in with exmples and ideas about collaboration, student publishing and creation, and immersive simulations and games. I popped my iPod on the table and recorded – most of the session – i’ll post it as a separate show.
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Ubercaster – a new tool that i’m going to review soon. – go check it out, mac users. I’d be interested in what you think about this.
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Videos from the Carrollton Farmers Branch Beyond 4 Walls keynote in Dallas are back up… update your feed (or resubscribe) to get them
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Podcasting and ELL – Allison Wimmer, who is an amazing foreign language teacher has a request for us – she’s doing some research and is looking for resources and ideas about blogging, podcasting and ELL. Email her at wimalim@gmail.com
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Two Minute SoapBox is a new collaborative podcast for teachers about teaching produced….you guessed it…by teachers. Make a short recording and email it to me at dschmit@intelligenic.com or just call (309)401-9353 and leave a posting as a voice mail.

Calling all student and educator podcasters! We, along with Humble Daisy – makers of ProfCast, are sponsoring a podcasting contest again this year! Although the structure has changed slightly we are still focused on the same goal – recognizing quality podcasting efforts from around the world.

Please share this information to educators who are producing podcasts as a part of their professional work.

This year we are dividing our contest into categories that focus on specific types of educational podcasting. Here are the categories:

Student Categories

• Documentary (i.e. research findings, biography, exposé)
• Talk Show (i.e. discussion, analysis)
• Drama (i.e. radio plays that teach)
• Sound Seeing Tour (i.e. descriptive language to introduce a place or objects)
• Where in the World (best new episode of Where in the World)
• Best in Show – This award recognizes the student podcast which exemplifies the qualities we value most in podcasts: learning, research, creativity, quality media production, and sustainability.

Teacher Categories

• Professional Development (i.e. teacher reflection, tips, strategies, research summaries)
• Instructional Materials ( i.e. study guide, process guides, guided learning)

While our prize vault is still growing, the prizes include

Student Prizes:

• a handsome trophy for the winner of each student category
• a single user license of ProfCast for each student winner’s classroom

Teacher Prizes:

• a handsome trophy for the winner of each teacher category
• a 500 seat license of ProfCast for each teacher winner’s school

Click here for all the details and the entry form…

Episode 40 – Listen

Here are a few notes on my recent trip to Australia and, in particular, my time in Adelaide, South Australia. I have been very lucky during my career to have had the opportunity to meet and interact with hundreds of teachers and students, but I have to say Adelaide has a special place in my heart.

Adelaide is a beautiful city with incredibly friendly people, great restaurants, and lots of fun places to hang out and experience the rich culture of Australia. I was especially impressed with the teachers and students who participated in my master class and workshops. The students were very articulate and creative and had LOTS of great ideas for launching their very own podcasts. They were also some of the most polite students I have ever run across. From the 1st year students all the way up to the year 12 students, I received warm “welcomes”, hand shakes and “thank you’s” from nearly every student. The people of Adelaide are a class act!
The master class and workshops were sponsored by the Technology School of the Future (TSOF). This is a fantastic organization chocked full creative and professional (and FUN!) people focused on bringing technology into the learning experiences of children in South Australia.
Karen Church was our main contact with TSOF and she treated me and my friend Tom, who was nice enough to travel with me all the way around the world, like royalty! Karen, along with Peter, Jim, James, Richard, Enver, and many others were a great team and took care of every detail you could imagine. We also got to meet up with Karen’s family for a day at the Cleland Wildlife Reserve where we had our first close encounters with Kangaroos, a Koala (named Banjo!), Wombats, Emus and other assorted Aussie creatures. We also spent a great afternoon tasting wines in the Barossa Valley region just outside of Adelaide. Beautiful places. Wonderful people. Did I mention it was also SUMMER there!?

Thank you Karen and all the wonderful people we met along our travels! We can’t wait to come back again someday.

Here is part two of the Keynote. This half has some useful integration ideas for bringing podcasting into the classroom. I hope you hear/see something you like and can use in your school.

If you have some ideas you would like to share, please feel free to drop me a line at dschmit@intelligenic.com or call my listener line at 1-(831) 303-2994.

You can view the video here.

Part 1 – Earlier this month I had the privilege of speaking at the Beyond 4 Walls Podcasting Conference in Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Texas. It was great to see so many people excited about the possibilities of podcasting in learning environments and to receive such an enthusiastic response from them.

Thanks to Maria Henderson of Apple Computer and the technology team at Carrollton-Farmers Branch for inviting me to share the day with their participants.

Special thanks to Richard Sands of the Technology Services Division at Carrollton-Farmers Branch ISD for taping the presentation and making it available.

Click Here for the Video