January 2008 — Features
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Building a Better Podcast
Once a name is conceived, adding a slogan for each individual episode helps too. Tony Vincent, president of Learning in Hand, an educational technology consulting firm in Omaha, NE, says slogans "give listeners something to remember" and help explain the overarching theme. The trouble is that creating unique, compelling names and slogans can be challenging.
To help with this, Vincent recommends that tech coordinators inform educators about a number of useful web resources, such as the Sloganizer, Slogan4u, and The PCman Website's Free Slogan Creator. Most of these sites are free.
False Alarm
TEACHERS' FEARS OF PODCASTING ARE UNWARRANTED—AND EASILY PUT TO REST.
IN THE K-12 ENVIRONMENT, perhaps the biggest threat to podcasting is fear—on the part of teachers who know about the technology, but haven't the foggiest notion how to use it. To confront and overcome this obstacle, some educators have developed podcasts geared for those of their colleagues who might not understand exactly how podcasting works.
For example, there's Kathy Schrock, technology adminstrator at Nauset Public Schools in Orleans, MA. Schrock's podcasts include short interviews with teachers and administrators about such things as how they use technology in their classrooms. This spring, she also held workshops for teachers. "Just the word podcast scares teachers away," she says. "There are a lot of misconceptions."
David Warlick, whose website, Landmarks for Schools, provides educators with a rich resource of teaching and learning tools, has experienced some of these misconceptions firsthand.Warlick says that when he sees teachers grow agitated over adopting podcasting, he focuses on explaining how easy it is for them to use.
"All you need is a computer, access to the internet, and a microphone that you can buy at Toys 'R' Us," he says. "These days, despite what the word podcasting might suggest, you don't even need an iPod to make it work."
Be Consistent
With good sound, well-edited content, and a catchy slogan, educators are ready to upload their student podcasts for distribution on the World Wide Web. One popular means of doing this is the free site Feedburner (recently acquired by Google), which sends more than 1.1 million "feeds" to nearly 600,000 users. Recent statistics from Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm, indicate that Feedburner is growing faster than MySpace and Digg.
Through these feeds, any educator at any given school can sign up to keep tabs on what's happening in any other classroom across the country. Nauset Public Schools' Schrock says Feedburner enables K-12 users—students and teachers—to establish recurring relationships with their peers and counterparts at other schools all around the world.
