Tomorrow sees my school’s first meeting about using radio shows/podcasting in school. It’s a meeting of the ICT committee so at this point it’s just to check over if I’ve got my ideas right. Has anyone out there had any problems with the RadioWaves site?

 Our plan is to have a radio show club which will allow kids to make their own shows, produce them, and upload them. They just need to book out equipment. I’ve made wee help sheets for recording and using Audacity - seems pretty straightforward for them.

I also want to get a “mobile recording studio” set up - just a box with a laptop (with Audacity), the mp3 recorder and microphone, and a guide. Would be great if people could book this out like they do with the ICT rooms. Has anyone got good estimates on the time it takes to produce a radio show in this way?

I have been starting to use the equipment in my class and it’s been really good fun so far. All the kids are doing is recording summaries they were to do for homework. Once (if!) I get them all in, we are going to string it together and add some nice background music. It will be a nice revision tool as well, I think.

We’re killing off the third year blog in favour of a blog cluster for S3. I’m getting them to do layout and stuff at the end of each class. I don’t want to link to it just now as next week we hit it big time, and that will be much more exciting! It’s going to use the same site as (hopefully) the S2 classes will use. This will mean all S2 pupils should have a fully functional blog for the rest of their time in school. Whether this will be useful or used is another matter but if they at least make the blogs, it could be interesting.

Also, went to my first Glow thing, though it wasn’t a meeting about Glow, rather an inservice for Glow mentors. It was all about digital video. I’m interested to see what’s available for schools though I was more interested in seeing who else was blogging etc. Never had a chance to ask but would be good to get Fife’s glow mentors to be a bit more public. I’ve made enquiries.

That’s all I’ve got to say for now! I hope to have informative posts about new class blogs, podcasts, and glow stuff in the next few weeks though. ScotEduBlogs, the aggregation project, is coming along well too, though need to get stuck back into coding after a week of watching others do stuff

I’m a bit scared of getting into “plodding through coursework etc” mode at school - so much to do but still need to make an effort to try new things, get new things started up and so on. But it’s easier said than done when trying to process 40+ programming tasks and many other types of practical assessment .