Module 5

Wow! Exploring podcasts and vodcasts has been the most exciting part of this course so far (and that's saying something).

I was fortunate enough to have been invited to attend another Inner West Sydney school staff meeting this afternoon which was facilitated by a specialist presenter. Get this - in one hour (and I promise you it wasn't a minute longer) my colleague and I created our first podcast.

Neither of us would profess to be Mac users and we had never seen the Garage Band application before. We made a short podcast about mermaids. In that one hour we learned what podcasts/ vodcasts are, how to add photos, record voices and select and add a music track. We both commented afterwards that we would have struggled had we not had the hands on experience. I was so inspired that when I got home I borrowed my husband's i-Book (that's obviously a secondary school perk - Kevin 07 you've forgotten us primary teachers) and made another podcast about my dog 'Miss Molly' (my mind was not capable of higher thinking tonight).

The applications for the classroom are endless. Working in a single stream school, neither myself nor my colleague have Stage partners so we had decided earlier in the year that we would work together as often as we could. With that in mind, we have worked hard on fostering a Buddy Mentoring relationship between our Early Stage 1 and Stage 3 students. Our first project will be creating a podcast that will be viewed by the parents of these students at our respective class assemblies. The Stage 3 students will plan the project - they will be responsible for taking 'buddy' photos, writing scripts, recording voices and selecting and adding accompanying music.

Secondly, our fabulously talented Stage 3 teacher, Angela, is working on an i-learning project that will be based on the HSIE unit - Democracy. She will be working collaboratively with Stage 3 teachers from two other single stream schools in programming this unit which will include a podcasting component.

The facilitator today suggested that simple podcasts could be used as assessment tools to record student learnings. In this context I will use them to pre-assess Kindergarten students' knowledge regarding the text types I'll be covering next term - from a Language Features of Text Types (LFTT) point of view.

Additionally, Kindergarten will be exploring an integrated unit of work about 'Farms' next term so I'll plan to create a class information book about everything we learn together - the children can illustrate the book using a program such as 'Paint' and I'll scan their work for inclusion in the book.

Probably the project I'm looking forward to the most will be working with Stage 3 to create 'progress journals', if you like, about each of the processes involved in creating some of the artwork they will be exhibiting in our Art Show next term.

The possibilities are only limited by your imagination! All I have to do now is work out how to actually save the podcast I made tonight and install i-Tunes on our school network.

Have fun pod/vodcasting! Until next time - take care - Cara