I've spent the week in Ojai, California at the Teach the Teachers Collaborative at the Thacher School. Although the scenery is amazing, my lasting impression about this week comes from the people. I worked with teachers, science content specialists and instructional technology specialists from the Los Angeles Unified school district. I shared some ideas with the whole group on sunday night and they helped me with my california transition...I did a ceremonial loosening of the tie. The teachers were really receptive to the possibilities of developing student inquiry and articulation AND the power of finding their voice and letting it resonate beyond the classroom. This episode is built around asking good questions. I would argue that questions make up the heart of good educational podcasts, whether teacher or student produced. Questions set our focus, and mirror the needs of our audience. Student podcasts that are designed to be extended academic conversations can really benefit from being scaffolded by a framework of questions. We'll look at a couple approaches to generating questions. The Question Game and using Bloom's as a framework from finding questions that move us toward higher levels of exploration.

This episode will focus on looking at syndication (subscription models) and the tools of aggregation (rss) as a way to create new streams from content already available from other producers. This can provide professional developers, teachers and students with a new strategy for leveraging rss into a type of ongoing academic scrapbook related to a particular research interest.

t’s time once again to celebrate all the great work that is happening in student and teacher created podcasts with the 2008 KidCast Podcasting Awards. This year we are shaking up the process a little bit. The truth is that the awards have been evolving each year as this technology grows and becomes more integrated into the learning process. Check out the website at http://www.intelligenic.com/blog for more information and the entry form.

The field trip has been a staple of the elementary school experience for generations. What comes to mind when you think back to your field trips as a student? As a student part of it was the novelty of getting out of our four walls and onto a big yellow bus and we were going off to places like “Pioneer Village”, “The Henry Dorely Zoo”, or the “Joselyn Art Museum”. Compared to the mundane school room these were amazingly exotic places. This episode will highlight some strategies and activities for pulling podcasting into your field trip to increase reflection and retention.

Recently, my friend and colleague, Dr. Guy Trainin stopped by my office and we started talking about the podcasts. He mentioned a podcast that he discovered from Penn State called 60 second lectures. I thought, Catchy name…probably worth checking out. So I did a search and found more than just a podcast with a catchy title. I found a new form that was as beneficial, from a learning point of view, to the writer as it was the listener. During this episode, we’ll explore this form and the value that distilling ideas down may have for our development as teachers and our students’ development as communicators.

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