This week brought a lot of challenges to my life with the holiday falling in the middle of an assignment week. I pushed through it and still finished early. There was some initial confusion with the assignment which my IA very nicely cleared up.
The actual assignment was not hard. The hardest part about this week was navigating the holiday and the family and friends that came into town and still finishing my school work. I decided that I would do my podcast on audacity. I wanted to choose something that I had not had experience with in the past. I have used iMovie and other programs on the suggested list, but audacity and audio was a challenge I had not taken on yet.
The program was easy after viewing a few tutorials on the web. I also spent some time playing with the program to find out what I could use. When I approach a project like this there are two things that linger in the back of my head. The first is relevance. I talk about that in the podcast, but relevance is a deciding factor in education. I do not want to put out a product that does not have relevance to my target audience. That is a primary failure of professional development in education. If you are not giving the right people the correct information you might as well be talking to a wall. I approached this with the understanding that not all teachers will use this software or will have the time, but did want to give a few stems so that the people viewing the content can start their own creative juices flowing.
The second piece that lingered in my head was the need to keep the tutorial basic. My time limit is around 2 minutes, so I cannot get into quantum physics there. Instead I need to look at my audience and try to give a brief enough explanation that is warranted and insightful without being overloading. Both of these peices came together to influence my podcast. If you have not already checked it out please go and see it.
This experience has taught me a lot. There is a lot of planning that goes into this and that goes into the creation of any podcast. I am not sure if I am going to use this program or not, but I do know that I will do whatever I can to keep my lectures meanngful