Chis Betcher skyped me last night to tell me that our podcast was nominated and is a finalist in the Edublog Awards 2007 in the best use of audio class. I am overawed to be a finalist.
Our podcast is only a little over a year old and I am very proud of its quality and variety of podcasts.
If you are a reader of this blog and haven’t done so already I urge you to click on the Edublog badge to take you to the voting page and vote for us before 6 December when the voting finishes.
The link will also take you to many other great educational websites that you may well enjoy reading, viewing or listening to.
They link to each other but until this evening I have had to convert the .m4a enhanced podcasts made in Garageband to .mp3 audio only files, upload to another Podomatic page that I made just for that purpose, use the Firefox add-on UNPLUG and through a tricky piece of code embed the .mp3 into Blogger. The ‘how to’ on this procedure is on my Bling4yrblog page if you still want to do this.
But tonight, just for fun, I tried to upload the .m4a file to Blogger movie and it worked! Now our enhanced podcasts play right inside our Blogger posts without having to click on an outside link. I didn’t think it would seeing it says they only process AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media. Yay!
I still prefer to view our podcasts within iTunes but I like the visual appeal of viewing as well as listening to our podcasts from within our blog. Click on the screen grab to view how it looks. Kieran will be ever so pleased now he can add another video to his blog.
Dean Shareski, Chris Harbeck, Darren Kuropatwa, and Clarence Fisher invited us for lunch via UStream this morning. I had an hour to spare over breakfast so thought I would join them. They were in Winnipeg and I am in Nelson, NZ but the geographical limits didn’t seem like something we couldn’t overcome!
The conversation was great- no-one was in lecture mode- just sharing our thoughts on blogging, networks and a sense of community.
About 20 of us from around the globe were able to join in the conversation, with good humour and a coffee.
While the conversation was happening I was thinking that my network is feeling more like a community to me- people who I have never met face-to-face but virtually through Twitter, Skype, Voicethread or blog make me feel welcome.
Chris, from Sydney, brought us all together via Skype for a bit of a chat about our practice. I encourage you to have a listen by clicking on Chris’ Virtual Staffroom logo. I hope you learn something from us and be entertained slightly as well.
Thanks Chris for bringing us together to discuss ULearn07, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, K12 OnLine, Second Life and more.
As our Waimea-South ICTPD cluster enters its final phase I thought I would construct a Voicethread to chronicle what we have learnt along the way with responses from all seven schools in our cluster.
I was really proud of the way my nine and ten year old students at Appleby School articulated what they felt their learning with computers had achieved this year.
I was also pleased that a number of teachers locally and around the globe were able to record their views. It would be great if you were able to add your own comments and grow the resource.
If you want a ‘how to’ to on using Voicethread go to my Bling4yrblog for help.
