Final Summary

At the beginning of the school year, I began my field study introducing the Writing Room with the focus to inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences (Writing Room, Abbynet e-mail and Podcasting). However, I soon realized that I was taking on way too much as my time line did not consider that my students were not computer literate, couldn't type, and needed additional support with the rules of writing.

After a slow and unmotivating start, I decided to change my focus to Podcasting since my class has had some experience using Garage Band. Before introducing this exciting new technology to my students, I needed to first learn all about it myself. I started small, by posting weekly unit spelling words as a Podcast on my website. Each week the Podcast quality improved as I learned to add music to the presentations. Next, I chose a small group of students to record a Reader's Theatre play to post on my site for students to listen at home. I was beginning to create a Podcasting hype in our school community as students and parents were beginning to ask questions and inquire all about it, and so I created a link from the school site as well as my site to include the entire community. I even had my principal involved by creating a Podcast of 'Welcome' where he spoke about our school and its exciting programs. Since our school is located in a high ESL community, I had our multicultural teacher translate and record my principal's Podcast in Punjabi and had that same Podcast translated again into Korean by our international teaching contact. Since many of our parents couldn't read our site anyway, this was an excellent opportunity to include everyone and break down any language barriers. To listen to this Podcast, Click Here.

As soon as the Podcast link became active, I began receiving many page hits and realized that I will need to keep up with new Podcast episodes. That was the time to bring my entire class into the project. My students, after writing and publishing fractured fairy tales, recorded their stories as Podcasts. I discovered that using the built in voice recorder in First Class 8.3 had some bandwidth issues as the recordings often skipped. Since we used Garage Band already, it was no trouble for my students to use this familiar program to record their Podcasts. Now that I am teaching poetry, I will have my students record their poems and have music added to enhance the mood of their poems.

During my observations, I have found that students were very excited about using this technology. I found Podcasting particularly useful as it covered all 5 strands of elementary Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Representing). Based on my individual page hits, people tended to visit the links that had audio and video clips as they were the most popular. Each web page on the Internet today must compete for people's attention.....more like people's attention spans. I have noticed that people, and me being guilty of this myself, have a short attention span with web sites as people don't generally have a lot of time to read through pages and pages of text, like we did back in the 1990s. Therefore, I wanted to keep these popular features as well as important information all on one page where people would not get board and leave. For my data collection, I made many detailed observations and summed them up regularly as journal entries on my blog site. Since my class was small anyway, I did not require an on-line survey, but simply checked in with each student to determine their thoughts and feelings on the projects that we were working on.

Overall, this learning community was a powerful experience for me, and ultimately my students. With the complete phase out of OS9 in the district, all schools will have Podcasting capabilities. It is my hope that other teachers will attempt this exciting and innovative addition to their Language Arts programs!

Podcasting Issues and Solutions

Hello Fellow Community Members. Like many of you have shared, I too have been very encouraged and impressed with the great things occurring in your schools with technology. For my blog update, I do not have a podcast or movie this time but I thought that I would briefly document some podcasting trouble that I have run into and offer a viable solution/alternative to keep podcasting alive in your school. For examples of podcasts that I have been involved with, please visit my class and school site at: http://sd34.homeip.net/shipwell/home/

With using First Class 8.3 Client for recording podcasts, I have encountered a problem with the bandwidth at my school......it is too slow and cannot keep up with the audio recording of my students' voices. The result sounds like a CD skipping, or a bad impression of the 80s character Max Headroom. I quickly realized that there was no way to fix this problem and so I have chosen to have my students use Garage Band to record their podcasts. The podcast option on this program have built in music and vocal tracks ready to go. Students record their voices on already set vocal tracks. Once recorded, students export their file to iTunes, convert it to an mp3 and then drop that file into their Home Page folders on Abbynet. From there they can access their podcast on the Internet. The only downfall, is that I have not figured out how to make the tunes have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and download to their computers. At this stage, downloading is not a big deal as my kids are pretty excited that their voices are live on the Internet. Currently, I am recording Fractured Fairy Tales and hope to get to poetry by the end of the month.