EVO 2012 Podcasting Course Feedback

What an amazing five weeks I spent on the fantastic Electronic Village Online Podcasting 2012 course! I feel as if I worked very hard during the session and I learned so much about Podcasting. I enjoyed all the activities, which were fun and challenging at the same time. Everything was set out very clearly. The moderators Evelyn Web, Miguel Mendoza and Teadira Perez were outstanding, and looked after the participants very skillfully. Readings such as The 4 Types of Podcasts were chosen carefully, and tutorials provided step by step guidance.

I wrote about the first two weeks in EVO Podcasting 2012:Opening The Door To New Horizons.

I have created a short story using Storybird.



This story is an almost faithful rendition of what happened during the fourth week of my course. I had fun creating it!! I will embed the Storybird as soon as the embed code becomes available. Please click on the link to view My EVO Podcasting Adventures!

http://storybird.com/books/evo-podcasting-adventures-2012/

A podcast was recorded specially for Fluffy's Blog. You can hear my young niece reading the nursery rhyme of Three Little Kittens. She had great fun reading this rhyme aloud and was very interested in how the podcast was created, using Audacity and then transfered to Podbean.

I was thrilled to be using my newly acquired podcasting skills in an activity aimed at primary school children.

Below you can view the Slideshare presentation, which I created for the final Week 5 Podcasting Fair webinar. I'm so glad I was able to attend this live webinar, as it was a fantastic finale to the whole session. Thanks to everyone for making it so enjoyable. I feel full of enthusiasm for creating podcasts now!

Podcast Presentation for EVO Podcasting 2012

One of the tasks I enjoyed the most was to interview a fellow podcaster, and I asked Natasa. She then interviewed me. We had great fun finding out more about each other.

We communicated via Skype and used the MP3 Skype Recorder to record the interviews.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

So I'd finally like to welcome you to my new podcasting blog, which is still in its infancy. It is simply called Janet's Podcasting Blog.

Miguel Mendoza has written a fab feedback blog post with his Reflections / Overview from the course, which you can read here. It is full of useful insights, and serves as a fantastic summary of what was covered during the action-packed five weeks.

Connecting Online 2012 - A Missed Connection

Abruzzo Under Snow!!
Sadly I was not able to attend my own webinar presentation for Connecting Online 2012 due to unforeseen circumstances, namely the terrible weather that hit the Abruzzo area the day before. I had been very excited indeed about presenting and I wrote about it in this post here.

A very big apology to Dr Nellie Deutsch and all the attendees who came to my session on Teaching Idioms with Web 2.0 Tools. I had recorded my Powerpoint presentation to send to Dr Nellie in case I encountered problems with the weather, but unfortunately we got cut off before I could send it.

I made a very big effort to get to an Internet point to do my webinar, but the odds were against me. Mother Nature, in fact.

This is my story below.

A huge amount of snow fell overnight in our area of Abruzzo, and I woke up to this view:

The situation was about to get even worse. Our phone and Internet connection went down and mobile phone reception was poor to non-existent, due to the severity of the weather. I decided we had to try to get to our neighbours, who hopefully would have a connection for me to deliver my webinar at 2pm. So we started walking up our road (over one kilometre long), which was just a mass of deep snow. Karl very kindly carried my laptop on his back.

I got stuck many times as the snow level was very high!

At this stage, I was hopeful that it was just us without connection, so I was hoping that our neighbours would be able to save the day.

While we struggled to make our way along the snow-covered road, I tried to ring my sister on my mobile phone to get her to contact Dr Nellie to let her know about my difficulties. Sadly, that message didn't reach its destination.

As you can see, I was dressed suitably for the arctic conditions. I wore my motorbike waterproof leggings and jacket, and Russian-style hat to keep me warm.

When we eventaully got to our neighbour's house after one and a half hours of walking through quite treacherous and dangerous conditions, we found out to my huge disappointment, that they too were cut off!!! No phone line and no Internet connection. This was so upsetting, because I had really hoped that I would be able to deliver my session, especially after having gone through all that struggle up the road. It was not meant to be.

I would like to thank Dr Nellie for valiantly holding the session together with 39 attendees from around the world. I take my hat off to her!! She conducted the session, despite her presenter (me)not showing up, in an amazingly calm and professional manner. I will observe and learn from her and this will be a role model for me. This is definitely something positive, which has come out of the negative. I think she did a brilliant job, coping with the situation. Thank you once again!!!

I have viewed the video, and it is an excellent example of how to remain calm and deal with an unforeseen situation. Thank you for holding the fort, Dr Nellie. Kudos to you.

JanetAbruzzo Unplugged!
To while away the days while we were cut off from the outside world, I created a series of podcasts, called JanetAbruzzo Unplugged, using Audacity. You don't need the Internet to record audio, so that was great. All I had to do next was upload the mp3 file from Audacity to Podbean or Podomatic for me to be able to publish the posts on my blog, which is what I have done now whilst in England.

How I got to England whilst being snowbound, is another story, and one which I will post in my Project 366 blog. This blog stopped abruptly due to the snow and Internet disruption, on Day 33:The Big Freeze is Looming.

Below the image is my Episode One: Dash Through the Snow, on Podomatic. You may need to turn up the volume, as I am still a newbie regarding recording with Audacity, and I am still feeling my way around this new tool.






Our road on 12th February after more snowstorms had hit our area. Karl has been without connection with the outside world for 10 days. Thank goodness he was able to ring me today and the Internet and phone line is finally back up!!!

Thanks very much to Marco, a local farmer and neighbour, who had cleared some of the snow from the road before this picture was taken.


The terrible weather has caused over ten million Euros of damage in the Abruzzo area alone, according to Il Centro, the local Pescara newspaper. The last time it was so bad was in 1956, before I was born.

You can view a video and more pictures from Abruzzo in the Snow here.

EVO Podcasting 2012 - Opening The Door To New Horizons!

I have been attending sessions in Electronic Village Online for the past three years now, and these are the ones I have done:

2009 - Digital Portfolios and Personal Learning Spaces
2010 - Images for Education
2011- Digital Storytelling
Each of the above excellent sessions have affected my life in a powerful way. They have helped me to become a more confident user of tools involved and also made me more aware of how these topics can be exploited in the classroom. I have been encouraged to create presentations as a result of these courses, and have presented talks for webinars and e-conferences. You can view all my presentations on Slideshare. Please feel free to use them in seminars or lessons if you feel they will be helpful.

This year I had a difficult decision to make. Which course to attend? Well, all the 14 courses on offer seemed perfect and useful and interesting for me as a teacher! I wrote about this in my post on the EVO Call for Participation here.

I had a dilemma as seen in the full Pixton cartoon below:



I made my choice...........

......... and here I am now I am very pleased to say, in the second week of a fantastic course, moderated by fab moderators as seen here below!

I had wanted to do a course on podcasting for quite a while now, but had never got round to it. The lure of web 2.0 tools to try out had always won the day in the past.

I had already experimented with tools connected with audio such as

• Vocaroo,
• AudioBoo
• Voki
• Fotobabble

These all help to liven up lessons, or blog posts in an interesting manner. However, I was keen to learn more about how podcasting can be used as an effective teaching topic.

Welcome to Podcasting - Weeks 1 & 2
You can view the weekly timetable freely available on the Podcasting 2012 Blog, which I have also added to my blog sidebar via RSS feed, so that I can easily check in to view the weekly plan and keep up with all the action!

In the first week we covered course objectives by recording ourselves on Voxopop. This was a really nice way to outline our course expectations and I liked this tool. It's nice to listen to everyone's expectations all in one place.

We also introduced ourselves via a Glogster, an interactive web poster site.

Below you can see my Glog. If you press on some of the images it will lead you to a blog post or a website. I have also embedded a podcast for Week 2 activities. We used Audacity to record an introduction podcast and then uploaded it to Glogster, This was a new thing for me and I had always wanted to add audio to my Glogs, but didn't really know how to do it. With the help of some skilful video tutorials, participants were shown step by step how to do it. I now know the way and I'm happy I can add more audio podcasts to future Glogs and projects!





We had to coment on 2 Glogs created by other members of the course. This was great fun and I enjoyed viewing and commenting on the amazing and beautiful creations! Screenshot below of some of the lovely glogs created and then presented at the first live Webinar.

Podcasting hosting sites amongst others I have learned about so far are:

• Podomatic
• Voxopop
• PodBeam

The lovely Podcasting moderators have done a great job of creating video tutorials to show us how to access and then use these tools to record a podcast. We are then invited to add our individual links to the Yahoo Podcasting site, so that we can share all the podcasts done so far. Part of the learning process is to view and comment on each others' efforts and I am enjoying this very much indeed!

In the second week we have been reading about what podcasts are and viewing sample podcast projects from around the world, and experimenting with recording our own podcasts with some podcasting hosting tools.

Below you can see a screenshot of my very first Podomatic podcast. It was easy to create and I liked using it. We had to upload a picture entitled "Out my Window" and then describe it. This activity is a great one for introducing ourselves on an online course, and it is very visual and fun to listen to the voices of participants. It makes the course much more personal.

Below is the embeddable podcast, which you can listen to.

There is so much more that I can write about but I think I have covered quite a lot in this post!! I will publish further updates over the next few weeks, so you can share my learning journey if you wish. I can guarantee that there will be lots more exciting and fun activities to share with you!!

Many thanks to the wonderful moderators for leading the way so skilfully. Thanks to all my fellow participants for sharing and interacting during the session. It's great fun learning with you!!

Update on Other EVO 2012 Sessions
I have read the following informative posts via links from Twitter updates. Thanks to the following educators for sharing their EVO experiences:

Carla's observations on the Classroom Digital Tools session
Marisa's reflections on Making a Machinima in Second Life - in 19 Steps
Eva's post on Digital Storytelling for Kids
Natasa's 5 Card Story for Class Digi Tools.

Watch this EVO 2012 space!!