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We got a new podcast out last week on Radio Sandaig.

And the first comment. I am looking forward to the children’s reaction. The comment lead me to Room 613 Talk another nice primary podcast.

We hit a last minute snag with Audacity, after moving a bit of the podcast that had been recorded in Audacity from one machine to another (in order to speed up editing) the children had trouble saving, on reopening their work the was nothing on the audacity timeline. After my initial suspicion that they were not saving properly, and a few desperate attempts to work around the problem, we had to do the whole edit and export to MP3 in one session.

The recording and editing are still a time consuming process, I’ve been talking to Mark Warner who runs Downs FM. Mark’s podcasters basically record the whole show in one go, live, which seems to be a lot quicker. Before the recording they prepare clips etc. I think they are using GarageBand. The Downs FM was a live weekly Radio broadcast to the school last session and obviously have a lot of skill in the production process. (A nice description here: about Downs FM)

I think we will try and adapt some of their working practices for the November podcast). We used the Down’s promo in our podcast and hope to send them one.

Podcasting seems to be helping us make connections (Room 613 Talk, Downs FM, all the feedback from the Keepers Podcast) with other schools a lot quicker than blogging did. Podcasting seem to have had a faster uptake too.

 

Pupdate, Downs FM has gone, here is a link to the archive

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Josie Fraser EdTechUK has set up a frappr edubloggers group map.

Frappr is an online tool that lets you map out the zip code where you live, work, vacation, or anything else! You can then share your unique URL with friends and find out where the rest of them live and work in relation to everyone else.

It would be even more fun if you could edit the shoutouts, mine is a bit of a mess.

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Not Lucida Grandie, I was wondering about that.

I got rid of the dotted line between the columns too, and played about with the templates, not that it makes much difference but it beats doing whatever work it was I was going to do this morning.

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Listening to Bob Sprankle’s

Bit by Bit Podcast: 14 which is as usual full of good ideas.

I was comforted to hear him discuss the problem of children without access to the internet getting to hear the podcasts. It is easy to get the idea that other places are a lot btter connected than we are. I was excited to here a solution send home an audio CD, great idea. I am going to burn a CD with the Radio Sandaig podcasts for children at school to take home. We just sent some audio to our partner school in Holland, so the idea chimed with me. I think I’ll include a bunch of podcasts from different school as examples to the Radio Sandaig team.

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I am also really starting to think about the Naace Primary Conference Fri 25 & Sat 26 Nov 2005 where I am talking about podcasting. At the stage of thinking that just giving my del.icio.us podcasting links would be more useful than anything else I could say.

There is now so much information out there about podcasting: back in May when I talked to the Glasgow Masterclass about blogs and podcasting there was about 5,020,000 google hits for podcasting. Today I got 32,000,000!

I am really looking forward to working out what I am going to say as it should help me figure out what I think about podcasting. The Keepers poem for National Poetry Day blog and podcast we did the other week got more responses than anything we have done for a while, so I am pretty excited about podcasting at the moment.

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Spending some time with http://www.sandaigprimary.co.uk redesigning the whole site to incorporate the blogs a little better. So far I’ve redesigned most of the site except for the blogs, the design is not live at the moment though.

Also going through my del.icio.us links and trying to organise them. I keep forgetting that ones tagged with education show up on the left. Since I installed an apple script to tag pages with @review I suppose I should organise my links more often.

I also went for a walk in Glen Luss yesterday in an effort to keep away from the mac, greatly regretting the loss of my digital camera.

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Ewan posted recently:

David Warlickised – the Warlick effect, about the effect of linkage by a really respected educationalist’s blog can affect the number of people reading your blog.

Well he has had the same sort of effect here.

Ewan picked up the recent Sandaig Poets postings and associated Radio Sandaig podcast for National poetry day. he also alerted Anne Davis a major US educational blogger.

Yesterday I was delighted to tell and show the children the positive comments and links they had received from and on Ewan’s blog.

The keepers podcast is moving up through our stats very nicely.

Since Anne Davis posted we have even more comments to look at today.

The positive effect on the writers and readers cannot (imo) be overestimated.

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I was looking at the stats for sandaigprimary.co.uk for October so far. I’ve noticed that the Primary 1 Toy Drawings from 03 – 04 are always in the top 10 pages visited. I couldn’t work out why. I also noticed a lot of of pages linking to the Toy Drawings following some of these lead to a picture of a particular toy from our page used on other sites.

turns out if you search for Action Man on google images our wee pict is number 4.

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Poll shows a third of 14- to 21-year-olds now have their own online content.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1586891,00.html

I was talking to Ewan about the Digital Divide

This Technology Guardian article makes intersting reading even if it dosen’t break down the 14 – 21 group.

six in 10 young people have internet access at home, with a quarter of those having their own computer in their bedroom.

I’d really like to see that one broken down socially and geographically.

But among those with a web connection at home, 31% said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.

Interesting in that it seems easier to involve girls at age 10 to 11 in blogging and podcasting in my limited experence.

Only one in 10 said they used the internet to read the news, with most preferring to use it as a means of expression and communication.

I guess thats a good thing as long as the communication is not just one way. I think I saw a nice graph when I read the article in the paper, but I might be wrong.