Silvercreek High School, Longmont, Colorado (St. Vrain Valley School District) has a podcast called Pods From The Creek . I choose a podcast from September 25, 2009 (Episode 7). The podcast was hosted by Mr. Goerner, the school librarian and was very informative as it related information going on around the school in the form of short announcements. It then goes on to interview Ms. Kohn, a language arts teacher at the school that is starting a new semester long online book class. Though Ms. Kohn is not in the library, I though this related nicely to a great idea that any librarian could do in a middle school or high school. Then next part of the podcast is an introduction to a new website called Drop.io, and then some iTouch/Phone applications.
The podcast is about 8 minutes long which personally I think is a good length of time as a school podcast should not be too long or drawn out (depending on the topic) or listeners may not want to tune in. My first impression of the podcast was that the host spoke clearly and not rushed, there was no background noise other than simple ambient music when needed.
The Podcast begins with Mr. Goerner the school librarian making routine school announcements to include school library happenings of which were at the time of the podcast: banned book week and a poetry slam. The host interviewed Ms. Kohn on her new online book class called "Best sellers". It works like an online book club where students choose books based on a particular genre. The students meet about 6 times throughout the semester in addition to the online meetings and could earn a .5 English elective credit.
In the first two days of the class, student will meet together for training on how to use Moodle which is a free onine virtual learning environment (vitrual campus). Several genres will be used and students can select a book from a genre then discuss the commonalities that are shared across that genre in Moodle. Some of the concerns addressed regarding the class were scheduling, adequate online training and self-discipline and motivation to stay current with the online discussions by utilizing the computer lab at school or getting online at home etc.
The next thing that was features was a website called Drop.ioDrop.io was a file sharing website, that was named by TIME magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2009. Well unfortunately Drop.io is currently out of commission after being acquired by Facebook.
Finally Mr.Goerner talked about two iTouch and iPhone applications: Worldview by CloudMade where you can search and browse webcams throughout the world and book mark them for future use. The second application was Google Apps by Google.
Obviously because this podcast was in 2009, some of the tech/web items are currently not "new" news, but the main idea was that Mr. Goerner disseminated a lot of information in a short 8 minute time frame and gave important highlights to the students of Silvercreek High School.
http://moodle.org/
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