Friday, March 2, 2012

Getting Our Hands Dirty

In class, we were asked to create a podcast on any story or short story of our choosing. Prior to this assignment, I had never listened to many podcasts before nor I had ever created one. Clearly, this was all new territory for me. Our group decided to do a podcast on the book Breathing Underwater. (Great Young Adult Literature book btw). We used a website called PodOmatic which was a very user friendly webpage. We picked our parts, wrote out our parts, and got ready to record. However, whenever using technology, you always run the risk of problems. For us, PodOmatic was not able to pick up our audio from either the laptop or the microphone we plugged in. (Anticipating any problems ahead of time is always a good tip). We ended up recording our audio on my iPhone, emailing the audio, and uploading it onto PodOmatic. 


This just goes to show that while technology is outstanding, it is not fool proof. As a teacher, if using technology, be prepared to have back up or adaptations in the event of something not working. Luckily for us, the iPhone worked just fine and we successfully uploaded it onto our page. Sometimes it is not always that easy. To ensure that you aren't caught off guard, just always be sure to have a back up assignment or another way that the task can be completed. I enjoyed making our podcast and can see how this would be beneficial for students to do a book review. All in all I had fun doing my assignment and look forward to hearing what other groups decided to do in theirs (: 

2 comments:

  1. It's good to see that you were able to adapt what you were doing to get the assignment finished. I had an issue like that in a class last semester, and it was annoying. But it's good that you had it happen to you as a student so you don't panic when it happens to you in the classroom.

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  2. Julie,

    First, let me say that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the podcast. One of the things I neglected to address in the beginning of the semester is "Murphy's Law." That is known as the old saying "anything that can go wrong, will." I typically put it on the syllabus of all "tech-based" courses that I teach, but this is the perfect venue for bringing it up.

    Congrats on having a back up plan. Yes, it is very, very frustrating when technology doesn't work. I cannot tell you how many times I have had panicked, annoyed and frustrated students have technology fail and ask me "why can't we just WRITE this?" So having a back up plan as well as being able to think of alternative routes is key.

    One more thing that I think we can all learn from this....don't procrastinate. I know from my years of using technology in instruction it has made me test the tech weeks and months ahead of time. I always tell students to pretend the project is due a day or two earlier....that way if there are any snafus they have time to work around them.

    Again, nice job. I have no idea why your mic didn't work, but I'm glad you found a way to still produce a successful podcast.

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