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.

You can’t keep a good man down.  After another all-too-brief session at Mary Webb,  Head of Music Jim Mould pulls out all the stops and produces podcast after podcast.  Apparently it’s becoming a real motivator for the pupils as they rush home to tell their parents what they did at school today, and “guess what Mum and Dad, here it is on the web”.  I’m sure things will get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and the learners get used to the software and the medium and produce some really cracking podcasts.
Take a trip over to Webbmusic and have a listen to the podcasts. Even better, subscribe to the feed in your podcatcher and receive the new ‘casts as they are made then download them toyour mp3 player to enjoy them on the way into school.  I’ve got “Ode to Mary Webb” on mine already so I can listen in the car.

Jim Mould, Head of Music at Mary Webb, yesterday set up the Music Blog ready for interactive work with learners. Once we’d discussed the concepts of blogging and podcasting Jim was really enthusiastic about using it with learners to enhance the curriculum. Of course there are security concerns, like giving out pupils’ email addresses in a public environment (they’re not), who manages the server at ethink (it’s me) and the ins and outs of letting learners have their own blogs. It’s refreshing that teachers are thinking about these security issues, but I’m certain that I’ve covered all bases at eThink. At least, that’s what the pilot projects show. (more…)