Today I attended the course, “Podcasting: From Desktop to the Enterprise.” The presenters provided lots of great ideas and resources for podcasting. They gave demos of a wide variety of software and recording hardware. The presenters, Kevin Reeve (Grand Rapids Community College) and Eric Kunnen (Utah State University), maintain a website that they are constantly updating with the latest and greatest information on podcasting and streaming: www.podcastinfo.org.

We are already using most of the software that they demonstrated, like Audacity, Camtasia, and GarageBand. They are currently testing a pre-beta version of Camtasia Relay, which captures to the local computer and then uploads your recording in the background to a server for encoding and publishing. Once profiles are set up, recordings can be instantly formatted in the desired file type and published to where you specify. It then emails you the URL. It doesn’t go directly into Blackboard, but you can paste in the URL. I’m not sure how beneficial this software would be in the high school setting, but it would be great for higher education.

They provided a great little resource booklet that I am happy to share with anyone interested!

The first session I attended was a pre-conference workshop entitled, Student Engagement in the Classroom Environment.  This husband-and-wife training team are very engaging presenters and bring a wealth of diverse experiences in technology in education, spanning k12 through higher ed.

We spent a good amount of time talking about blogs, wikis and podcasts.  Since we’ve been knee-deep in these tools for quite some time, some of the information was redundant, BUT these presenters tended to place a pedagogical slant to the information presented.  So, while I grasped the technology involved with the creation of the content, they encouraged the participants to put an educator’s “filter” in place…taking the time to think about curricular outcomes.