“We”- that’s the royal “We”- do weekly podcasts at my school. I started doing them this year from our podcast central sound room (my office) moved to a larger space, as the crowd around the microphone was uncomfortable in my small office, we invited a couple of kids to participate, and poof…. All of a sudden all the adults were relegated to the back of the stage as the kids started creating our weekly podcasts with quality content.This last Thursday, my creative and focused technology coordinator, Jeff Utecht, came to me and said that he did not have time to get to classrooms to assist the 5th grade kids in the organizational aspects of the podcasts this week. He then handed me his iPod and a voice recorder and to me to just record the podcast and just pass it off to him in the afternoon when we met for a meeting at a location in downtown Shanghai.
COMMON SENSE would tell you that I would organize my thoughts, write a few notes, and get my calendar out to “talk to my audience” about my views on the school operations, our calendar of events and a few tips or tricks about working with the school. All good, but just a retread of ideas we have done before. Instead, I got this crazy idea that I would just stroll around and talk to teachers and students as I did my usual “lap” around the school. The podcast turned out to be a very lengthy 13+ minutes and Jeff cut out a fair amount of stuff (sorry to the teachers and students who ended up on the cutting room floor), but the result was a light hearted, fun and I think repeatable audio trip around the school. Thanks to Jeff, who took the time to paste together the sound files with some fun background music, and thanks to the teachers and students who participated in – impromptu- this podcast! It was a crazy idea that just seemed to work.
Our podcast page is a pretty popular place these days. According to our clustr map we have had over 4100 hits on this page this year! Ok, probably 20 or more are just me, as I check it frequently, make sure all things are working ok, and the kids are using the page appropriately (with Mr. U’s guidance), but even if we subtract 3000 hits we are doing pretty darn well! A few things a that Jeff has done to make the page a fun place to visit beyond our podcasts are a free download of the week from music artists sharing their work on the web. Frequently we get note back from them thank us for sharing their songs. Our recent principal coffee has been podcast and we will do it again later this next month. Hopefully I can get our PTSA to start using this medium to share their information out to our community as well. All in all, it is easy, it is fun and I think it has help change the shape of what we are doing in our classrooms as well.
It seems that more than just our school community is listening in as well. David Warlick wrote about us on his blog "2 cents worth" yesterday! Some of you from Pudong may remember David from his recent evening presentation!
He wrote:
I think that we need to find new ways of assessing the success of our education endeavors, methods that are more relevant to a changing market place, changing customers, and a rapidly changing information landscape. I found a perfect example this morning when I ran across a podcast program from the Pudong Campus of the Shanghai American School. One of their tech people, Mr. Torris simply walked into grade 5 classrooms and started interviewing teachers and kids about what they were learning.
What’s different here is that rather than relying on numbers that describe learners as products, the community is almost literally invited into the classrooms to learn what and how their children are learning and what they are doing with it. This is what I would like to have known about my children’s schools. I’d like to have been part of it — not just an outside inspector.
Thanks David for the nod and the compliment of calling me a "tech person". What a compliment!!
