Conference Podcast

Here is the conference podcast made by pupils in Year 8 today. Have a listen and tell us what you think.

Download conference_podcast.mp3

The podcasting workshop lasted for most of the day and pupils had the opportunity to practise recording their voices using Audacity and then edit their vocal tracks with podsafe music from Flash Kit loops and Magnatune. Once the pupils felt confident with recording and mixing, we made the definitive versions group by group all on the same laptop with my USB microphone. We were fortunate enough to be able to use our Head of Year 7's office next to the ICT suite which acted as an ideal recording studio. The pupils seemed to really enjoy the final recording despite being a bit nervous that they may make mistakes. They all did very well and the fact that they had all prepared their scripts beforehand really paid off.

Once we had made the six recordings, I exported them individually as mp3 files and transfered them across to the shared area on our network via my memory stick. Pupils could then mix them with the podsafe music I'd copied for them. I showed them how to balance the vocal and music tracks by reducing the volume of the latter with the Envelope Tool or by increasing the volume of the former with the Amplify Effect.

We then exported the results again as mp3 files and transfered them back on to the laptop for the final mix. For this part, I asked one pupil to add an intro saying the name and the date of the podcast and another pupil to record a suitable ending. To finish, we just exported the completed podcast and uploaded it in the body of a new post on my blog. To get the finished product up on the net by the end of the day was a great motivator and a relief for me that everything had gone to plan.

I know there are mistakes in the podcast, be they grammatical errors or editing slips, but that doesn't matter. We achieved what we wanted to achieve by the end of the day which was to show how a podcast could be made from scratch and published to the web in a relatively short period of time. I was really proud of what the pupils had been able to produce in the time they had had as well as the mature way that they had dealt with questions from the teachers who had observed what they doing in the workshop.

Here are some thoughts from three of the pupils about the benefits of podcasting in French:

Download evie_sam_and_jess_talk_about_podcasting.mp3

In addition to making the podcast, pupils created a couple of PowerPoint slides each where they wrote down their impressions of the day. We presented these as part of the plenary and I've reproduced them here as a Slidestory.  As you'll see, the pupils were not afraid to say what they really thought!

Comments

[Alison Baker]

Hello Joe,

Thank you very much for such an informative, exciting and useful conference Friday - well worth the journey from the mainland. Please tell your year 8 classes how much I enjoyed their Podcast class - what a super bunch of children and very talented too. They were very helpful and patient with their explanations - several future MFL teachers, with any luck? As I told them, my y11 - 13 will be very impressed with how clever they are, because they don't know how to podcast - yet -they are going to have to learn now!

With best regards for half-term
Alison Baker
Head of MFL
St Philip Howard Catholic High
Barnham, West Sussex

[Esther Mercier]

Joe, I have followed your tips on adding music to a recording with Audacity and it sounds so much better. I used the music from Flashkit.
Brillant!
You can listen to them here:
www.atantot2.co.uk
Thanks
Esther

[Joe Dale]

Hi Alison and Esther,

Alison: I'm delighted you enjoyed the conference. I'll pass on your message to our pupil podcasters and I look forward to hearing your podcasts in the future. Do you plan to put them on a blog? That would be really cool.

Esther: I've had a quick listen to your podcasts and I agree that adding music makes a big difference. The Flash Kit loops are ideal for this purpose. Here is a list of all the podsafe sites I've found so far:
http://del.icio.us/joedale/podsafe

Best wishes

Joe

[Esther Mercier]

Thanks
I will make good use of them!
Esther

[[email protected]]

what wonderful ideas. Hope to see you in Kent at our ALL conference on March 10th 2007

[[email protected]]

Thanks to Ashley for his amazing ICT support!! I really appreciated it!!

[Malcolm Hope]

Joe
Belated but nonetheless sincere thanks for the excellent workshop day you put together for us at Nodehill on 20 October. I rarely come away from such days with so much really useful and accessible information to pass on to colleagues here on Oxfordshire. I spent a good deal of time last week following up links - and I don't begrudge the time, so many thanks to you, your helpers and your pupils, and best wishes for your future endeavours.
Malcolm Hope
Adviser for MFL, Oxfordshire