Day+4+(Active)

=Podcasting and Your Class: What Can Podcasting do for Your Class?=

Overview:

 * What is a podcast?
 * How does a podcast fit in an AP class?
 * Research, create, and embed a podcast for your subject area into a personal website
 * Presentation of Podcasts for evaluation

Prerequisites:

 * Teachers are to go to Stuff You Should Know and listen to a podcast that is of interest. Simply click on the title of the episode and it will begin playing on your computer.
 * While listening to the podcast, teachers are to write down 5 features that made it a good podcast, or 5 features that made it a poor podcast. Download form here
 * Follow this tutorial on how to download Audacity and LAME MP3 encoder to your laptop.

media type="custom" key="13974732"


 * Follow this tutorial to set up your own Podbean account [[file:Signing_Up_for_a_Podbean_Account.pdf]]

Objectives:

 * 1) summarize proces of making a podcast for students
 * 2) evaluate what makes a good podcast
 * 3) create a podcast for content area and upload to their class website

Content:
A quick search on Itunes and anyone can see that podcasts are exploding in popularity. From relative obscurity a few years ago, to a market that is helping create carreers and inform people on all kinds of niche topics, podcasts are becoming an ever more important component of modern life. From an education perspective, podcasts are an excellent source for engaging presentations of information in a less formalized fromat than a classroom lecture. Students have the ability to let their creativity run free by including clips of music, tinkering with sound effects, and thinking of original ways of presenting material. Podcasting; however, is a skill that must be learned through experience. Therefore, if you are going to use this technology in your classroom, you have to have experience with creating your own. Today, all of the AP teachers involved in this PD will have the opportunity to create a 10-15 minute podcast on any topic that they are passionate about within their topic. Once you have had this first hand experience you will be able to help your students navigate the sometimes tricky waters of creating a podcast.

Learning Activities:

 * 1) Briefing by AP coordinator to discuss the use of already produced podcasts in classes, as well as safety and security issues of posting student work to the web, The coordinator will also briefly discuss copyright law and how it applies to podcasts using a Google docs presentation and the following Youtube vide: media type="youtube" key="wL1bX1gepEc" height="315" width="560"
 * 2) Teachers will be divided into large groups based on their content. This will allow AP teachers to pool their collective knowledge of the content in order to best incorporate this new technological skill.
 * 3) Facilitators will lead the group in a discussion of the podcasts that they listened to the night before. Teachers will use the Podcast Evaluation document to help populate the features of a podcast that would work and would not work for their classes.Do a promethean board diagram screen capture
 * 4) Facilitator will then lead the group through the process of creating an audacity file and walkthrough the basic features of the program. During this time in the professional development, teachers will be able to get accustomed to Audacity's controls so that they will be able to instruct students
 * 5) Teachers will then break into groups of 2 and 3 to perform research, create a script, and then record their own podcast on a given topic. An example for AP Psychology could be to research information about the psychology of voting to tie in current events and the content of the course of study. Assignment Docmedia type="custom" key="13981820"
 * 6) Teachers will then post their podcast to Podbean.com to be listened to and critiqued by other teachers in their content area.
 * 7) Teachers will discuss as a group the key steps in developing a lesson plan as well as some common pitfalls that studnets might face, they will then develop a lesson plan for how to teach podcasting to their students. Lesson Plan Format

Resources:
Podcasting Legal Guide Educator's Podcast Guide by Bard Williams 2007 9 Safety Tips for Podcasting Screencastomatic.com [|Podcasting in the Classroom]

Session Evaluation:
media type="custom" key="13984602"