Friday 20 January 2012

EVO Podcasting 2012 - Opening The Door To New Horizons!

I have been attending sessions in Electronic Village Online for the past three years now, and these are the ones I have done:

2009 - Digital Portfolios and Personal Learning Spaces
2010 - Images for Education
2011- Digital Storytelling
Each of the above excellent sessions have affected my life in a powerful way. They have helped me to become a more confident user of tools involved and also made me more aware of how these topics can be exploited in the classroom. I have been encouraged to create presentations as a result of these courses, and have presented talks for webinars and e-conferences. You can view all my presentations on Slideshare. Please feel free to use them in seminars or lessons if you feel they will be helpful.

This year I had a difficult decision to make. Which course to attend? Well, all the 14 courses on offer seemed perfect and useful and interesting for me as a teacher! I wrote about this in my post on the EVO Call for Participation here.

I had a dilemma as seen in the full Pixton cartoon below:



I made my choice...........

......... and here I am now I am very pleased to say, in the second week of a fantastic course, moderated by fab moderators as seen here below!

I had wanted to do a course on podcasting for quite a while now, but had never got round to it. The lure of web 2.0 tools to try out had always won the day in the past.

I had already experimented with tools connected with audio such as

  • Vocaroo,
  • AudioBoo
  • Voki
  • Fotobabble
These all help to liven up lessons, or blog posts in an interesting manner. However, I was keen to learn more about how podcasting can be used as an effective teaching topic.

Welcome to Podcasting - Weeks 1 & 2
You can view the weekly timetable freely available on the Podcasting 2012 Blog, which I have also added to my blog sidebar via RSS feed, so that I can easily check in to view the weekly plan and keep up with all the action!

In the first week we covered course objectives by recording ourselves on Voxopop. This was a really nice way to outline our course expectations and I liked this tool. It's nice to listen to everyone's expectations all in one place.

We also introduced ourselves via a Glogster, an interactive web poster site.

Below you can see my Glog. If you press on some of the images it will lead you to a blog post or a website. I have also embedded a podcast for Week 2 activities. We used Audacity to record an introduction podcast and then uploaded it to Glogster, This was a new thing for me and I had always wanted to add audio to my Glogs, but didn't really know how to do it. With the help of some skilful video tutorials, participants were shown step by step how to do it. I now know the way and I'm happy I can add more audio podcasts to future Glogs and projects!





We had to coment on 2 Glogs created by other members of the course. This was great fun and I enjoyed viewing and commenting on the amazing and beautiful creations! Screenshot below of some of the lovely glogs created and then presented at the first live Webinar.

Podcasting hosting sites amongst others I have learned about so far are:

LinkThe lovely Podcasting moderators have done a great job of creating video tutorials to show us how to access and then use these tools to record a podcast. We are then invited to add our individual links to the Yahoo Podcasting site, so that we can share all the podcasts done so far. Part of the learning process is to view and comment on each others' efforts and I am enjoying this very much indeed!

In the second week we have been reading about what podcasts are and viewing sample podcast projects from around the world, and experimenting with recording our own podcasts with some podcasting hosting tools.

Below you can see a screenshot of my very first Podomatic podcast. It was easy to create and I liked using it. We had to upload a picture entitled "Out my Window" and then describe it. This activity is a great one for introducing ourselves on an online course, and it is very visual and fun to listen to the voices of participants. It makes the course much more personal.

Below is the embeddable podcast, which you can listen to.





There is so much more that I can write about but I think I have covered quite a lot in this post!! I will publish further updates over the next few weeks, so you can share my learning journey if you wish. I can guarantee that there will be lots more exciting and fun activities to share with you!!

Many thanks to the wonderful moderators for leading the way so skilfully. Thanks to all my fellow participants for sharing and interacting during the session. It's great fun learning with you!!

Update on Other EVO 2012 Sessions
I have read the following informative posts via links from Twitter updates. Thanks to the following educators for sharing their EVO experiences:

Carla's observations on the Classroom Digital Tools session
Marisa's reflections on Making a Machinima in Second Life - in 19 Steps
Eva's post on Digital Storytelling for Kids
Natasa's 5 Card Story for Class Digi Tools.

Watch this EVO 2012 space!!

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