The 2nd Quarter Memoir Podcast Project is up. This was done in Ms. Dunn’s English class. The students had read Funny in Farsi (and did a Skypecast with the author!) and they had written their own memoirs. Then they listened to a variety of spoken word pieces before recording their own pieces. What you see on our blog are many of the final results.

Structurally, the students recorded the podcasts in GarageBand, and this is where the "streaming" of classes we do at SLA really pays huge dividends. The students were able to learn GarageBand in their Tech Integration class which they take with the same cohort of students as they take English, History and Science. This means that Ms. Hull could work with Ms. Dunn, doing "just in time" teaching of the tool so that the kids could learn the tool because it would help them with the project they were doing. I really do believe that this kind of integrated teaching allows students to really see the transformative nature of these new tools because they experience how it changes their experience as a student across all disciplines.

And it also means that teachers who want to use these tools can know they don’t need to be the expert, because they can coordinate the teaching with Ms. Hull. I’m pretty sure that most teachers don’t want to have to stay current on progressive pedagogy, content area materials and learn every single tool the kids might need. Knowing that they can be conversant in, for example, GarageBand without having to know it well enough to teach it means that you can assign podcasting projects more easily. Reducing the teacher fear-factor is a huge piece of the puzzle.

And you’ll see, there are still glitches. Elgg does not pull up the in-browser media player for m4a enhanced podcasts, so we had to fiddle around for a while with GarageBand and iTunes before we figured out how to export from GarageBand to iTunes and then modify the settings in iTunes so that iTunes could convert the file to an mp3. Unfortunately, one whole class had posted the final podcasts before we got good at that, so some of the files have to be downloaded, rather than played over the web.

We’re also finding that Elgg has some real limitations for a school setting. It’s, well, clunky, and it’s not as easy to set up the kinds of monitoring tools we want. For example, the link I posted doesn’t contain every podcast, it just has all the most recent posts. You’d have to do a search for the keyword "podcast" to find all the rest, and even then, it’d pull up the name of users who have podcasts, not the posts themselves. Frustrating. Now that being said, the barrier to entry with Elgg is low enough that we’re able to get everyone up and running with it quickly, so there’s a lot to be said for that. But it doesn’t quite seem to be the killer app yet.

More importantly, the kids’ voices are up… comments are off while we configure the spam-filter for elgg, so if you want to leave kids messages, please do so here, and I promise to pass them along. Give a listen. There are some amazing stories there.