Almost four years ago, during the summer of 2007, our school district started offering podcast certification training for any SDCC (School District of Clay County) employee who wanted to learn how to create educational podcasts to use in their jobs. This program was opened up to teachers, administrators, and support personnel at both the school level and the district level. It started out as a very ambitious program and participants were required to successfully complete all three of the training levels below in order to become “Certified Clay County Podcasters”:
- Podcasting in Education - Introductory Level
- Podcasting in Education - Intermediate Level
- Podcasting in Education - Advanced Level
Today this entire program has been streamlined, and now we are offering the following three different podcasting courses:
- Podcasting in Blackboard
- Podcasting in Education – Audio Podcasts
- Podcasting in Education – Video Podcasts
All three courses are still open to any employee of the School District of Clay County who would like to start creating educational podcasts to use in their jobs with the district. This time, once a participant has successfully completed a specific course, he/she is ready to start using that particular type of educational podcasting in his/her job. If you refer to my earlier post (6/29/10) entitled *New* Podcast Training for Clay County Educators, you can learn a little more about the new Podcasting in Blackboard course.
For the remainder of this post, we will focus on the Podcasting in Education – Audio Podcasts training that we are now offering. During this training the participants will learn about the following four basic steps all podcasters need to follow when creating a podcast:
- Plan
- Produce
- Publish
- Promote
First, the participants will learn how to plan the podcasts they want to create. Then they will learn how to use two software programs called Audacity and Lame Encoder to actually produce their podcasts. The next step will be for the participants to publish their new podcasts by uploading them to a dedicated server where they will be stored. The last step is for participants to promote their newly created podcasts. They will do this by creating a blog that will be specifically used to showcase the podcasts they will be creating during and after this training. These blogs will be created using Blogger which is Google’s free online tool for creating blogs. Participants will learn how to embed their podcasts within the contents of a post in their blogs. Blogger is programmed to include RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) which is “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as a blog” (“RSS,” 2011). This is a perfect way for podcasters to share their new podcasts as they are created.
This has been a brief explanation of the new Podcasting in Education – Audio Podcasts training that we are now offering in Clay County. If you are an employee in the School District of Clay County, Florida and you would like to learn how to start creating educational podcasts to use in your job, contact me at rpaine@mail.clay.k12.fl.us and I will be glad to assist you. If you have any specific questions that were not answered in this post, please make sure to send me an email and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. I am the facilitator/instructor for these courses.
Next week’s blog post will be a brief explanation of Podcasting in Education – Video Podcasts which is the third type of podcast training we are offering in Clay County.
Reference:
RSS. (2011). In Wikipedia. Retrieved February 23, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/RSS
wiki/RSS
