Hands On Support in Shropshire

Wow, WHAT a day! Keith Havercroft asked me to do a spot on podcasting at his music conference and I gladly accepted. In two sessions of an hour and a half each we looked at using Audacity to create podcasts. Well, you can’t really do a world-class production in the time available but judging by the amount of concentration going on, delegates gained a lot from the support and defied the odds to produce some fine intro files for podcasts, publishing them at lopcast.ethink.org.uk. Anyone looking for helpfiles should try here. I’ll do some more over the summer. Examples of blogs and podcasts we looked at were Hope School’s, Mary Webb School’s and Oldbury Wells‘. We touched on issues of pupils having a worldwide audience for their work, pupil motivation and peer review but really the session was about getting hands-on and creating something.
We used Audio Networks for the pre-recorded soundfiles, a superb resource negotiated to be free when used within the RBC. We looked at issues of licensing and copyright and I pointed people towards the Creative Commons site for further clarification than I could give.

I’m hoping that we see some more eThink blogs appearing as the delegates and their pupils start to reap the learning benefits of blogging and podcasting.

For my own Personal Software Challenge, I used Cool Timer for the first time to set time limits for exercises.  What fun!  I hear Mrs Brown is using it in lessons too and she uses different soundfiles for the alarm!  What fun it must be in those lessons.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Music, Emergent Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.