Friday, November 21, 2008

Success!

Our first episode of the Communicast for the 2008 - 2009 school year was published yesterday, November 20, 2008. Although we were behind schedule, the efforts of the students clearly showed in the quality of the podcast.

This podcast is a group effort, and I want to thank the people involved in the project. First, thanks to Valerie Howard, the computer teacher at South Philadelphia High School, for being the co-sponsor of the podcast. Next, the student podcasters: Shaheed, Jasman, Yolonda, Maria, Joshua, Stacey, Michael, Kahlil, and Imene. Working behind the scenes are the Digital Service Fellows: Brandon and Tiani. I want to thank them for their help in working with the students as they wrote their scripts and practiced their speaking parts. They also worked with Imene, who produced the theme song.

I'm hoping that some of the students will add comments to this post, and describe how they feel, now that they are published podcasters.

I'm already looking forward to the next episode. I want the students to take more responsibility for the work, including some of the editing. I also hope that eventually, they'll work with some of the podcasters from last year (elementary school students) and collaborate on their podcast episodes.

But for now, we want to celebrate the successful posting of this episode, which is Communicast 7. To access the podcast, please go here:

http://podcast.phila.k12.pa.us

or here:

http://podcast.phila.k12.pa.us/weblog/440_communicast/

As the students said, "The podcast is in, and we're out!!"

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Staying Focused

The original target date to publish our first podcast episode for this year was October 31. Unfortunately, we didn't meet our target. This was due to a lot of factors, but the most important thing is that we're still working on it, and we'll have a finished product soon. I'm at SPHS this morning, to record some new segments. We want to finish recording everything on Monday, November 10, and then put it all together and post it.

One of the major problems we ran into was that the various segments didn't fit together as well as we would have liked. That's why we're working to develop a focus for the episode. The other part of staying focused is to keep our eye on the task at hand. There have been so many activities going on, that it's been hard for all of us to devote the necessary time to get this project completed.

So, now that the World Series (Go Phillies!) and the elections (Congratulations, Barack Obama!) are behind us, maybe it'll be easier to stay focused on our podcast project.