Tech Tools & Professional Development – August 2-9 (Podcasting)
I’ve been too busy with professional development (among other things) to blog about professional development much these last couple of weeks. So let’s summarize briefly…
I attended the Special Education Teacher Leadership Academy (SETLA) in Charleston, WV from July 26 to the 30th. I got a new laptop out of the experience. I sat through a brief intro to Vista and learned (among other things) that it has its own screen capture tool (the Snipping Tool) built in. I attended a workshop on INTEL’s online classroom tools. And I spent a little while in a podcasting workshop.
There was lots of other stuff.
The podcasting is something I’ve put to immediate use. My page at the SETLA website has links to two podcasts on it, on one why life long learning is important in our society and one on something called cognitive dissonance. The podcasts are produced using a program called Audicity.
Learning to use a new technology often results in the need to learn more about other technologies. MY podcasts are part of a book student. I need to do at least six or eight more. And that presents some online storage problems. So I’m exploring ways to solve that through some kind of a webhosting service. Podcasts usually open in Window’s Media Player or in RealPlayer. Both can show pictures connected to an audio file. With commercial mp3 files, that’s usually an album cover. I can’t help but think there’s a way I can brand my podcasts with a logo or icon of some kind in that same way, but I haven’t figured it out yet…
