Project 5

I'd never created a podcast before. I'd listened to them in the past, but without a real "topic of expertise" and an audience, I never tried creating one. This was interesting as we had to have a plan, and not just start talking about something and hope it turned out well.

The tricky thing about creating the podcast was that you had to come up with a subject (In my case, playing a hunter in World of Warcraft) then create a powerpoint presentation based on it, then create a script to follow when narrating. I felt like the creation process should have flowed smoother somehow, but I'm not sure yet how to make it do that. After all the work, I ended up a minute and a half over, and had to cut some large chunks of extraneous information. That in and of itself was a good task to do, as it's always easy to go off on a bunny trail, in fact I remember this one time, when I was at this thing and I....

Yeah, I do that.

I really liked this project, because it took away some of the mystery of creating a podcast. It's not nearly as difficult as I'd always assumed (not that I've stayed up nights thinking about it or anything). When I was finished, I felt like I'd created something good. Granted, it's an example of how to do something not in anyway related to English, but for me it's a proof of concept that I can make something like this in the future when it really matters.

I imagine podcasts would be fantastic in the classroom in a number of situations. If you created a set of them for each topic you covered in class, and a student missed one of the days you lectured, you could point them to the podcast that covered the topic you addressed and they could catch themselves up, and can't use the excuse "I wasn't here that day." The other side of this, is if I'm out sick, rather than relying on a sub to cover some heavy topic I feel like the students really need to learn about while I'm out, the sub can show the podcast and make the kids take notes or something. Education continues even in my absence, and the content is mine, not the school system's. That's nice.

I like that the podcast project wasn't necessarily tied to our area of focus. We're free to teach something that we enjoy outside of school, whether that's drumming or World of Warcraft... We got to have fun, and learn the techniques. I think if you'd tied it to our areas, we'd have done fine as well, maybe to make things a little trickier, find out what subjects are represented in the class (Science, Math, Social Studies, English) and pick a standard for each of them to work under. It's easy to come up with something under a standard we're familiar with, but working under one of the others would be a nice challenge. Granted, with the limited amount of time we're afforded, you can't make it too rough, or it might not get done. Meh, I like it the way it is. Don't change it. :-D