Allanah's Appleby Showcase

I am trying to see what kind of podcast you can get just with Podomatic's recording. As I see it the downside will be that you only get one shot of making the recording. If you muck it up you can't edit it, add or delete. It all has to be done in one go. It is a really quick way of doing the business though if you know what you want to say. 117KB 29 seconds

This week was a very busy one for us at Appleby School. Our senior classes performed on stage with Suzanne Prentice who is a famous New Zealand entertainer. She has been awarded a Queen's Honour for her music services. The sound tracks on this podcast are of Moturoa class singing a couple of Suzanne's Christmas themed songs. We recorded this part back in the classroom. Our performance was 'wicked'. By Braden (Year Four) 1.6MB 3 minutes 7 seconds

Our podcast is getting itself noticed by other educational podcasters around the globe. It makes the world seem like a smaller, more connected place!

This week we changed the format of the podcast a little and had more of a conversation about Jane Evans' art. Jane is a famous Nelson artist who is known for using bold colours to express emotions and feelings in her art work. We had a class trip to the art gallery to learn about her art works last week. In this podcast Jackson C, Elliott and Jillian all make a contribution.

We have been learning about logos and how they help to sell a place or product. We are looking to changing our school logo in the future as well. We used very advanced technology this time because we interviewed Teri, a student from nearby Brightwater School, using Skype, the free internet telephone application. We never actually left our classroom. Teri explained about her school's logo very well. Thank you Teri. What a cool way to interview people who are in far off places. One more thing of note! A clever techie kind of thing! When the podcast is playing if you click on where it says Brightwater School at the bottom of the photo you will stop the podcast and be taken to Brightwater's web site! I bet you didn't know that!!!!!!!

Pete's Year Five and Six class have been working extensively creating music with Garageband. William and Josh have created this jingle that will be played on a local radio station.

We had the pleasure of being able to interview Dean Schneider, a New Zealand nature photographer, who had come to visit with us for an afternoon to learn more about the sorts of things we are doing with computers in our classroom. We were surprised to learn that Dean had taken the photographs for the school reader 'Helping the Hoiho' which was Dillon's favourite when he was younger. I think all NZ children would recognise that book.

Instead of the usual story of, "What we did in the holidays," we made a podcast instead. A much more fun exercise in that everyone had a turn in front of the microphone. It took lots of practise to get our voices sounding nice and clear and with plenty of expression.

Jamie, Sam J and Ruby made this podcast about our wonderful three dimensional art work. When you are finished listening click on the Appleby School link to send us some feedback. Enjoy the holidays. Moturoa

There is a new look for iTunes v7 on Apple. Very cool.

With Point England School's podcast as a model I think we managed a higher quality podcast this week. This week's crew spent a couple of sessions listening to Point England's quality podcasts a bit like an exemplar really. After that they were given a bit of a template on which to scaffold their discussion. After that groundwork the track was laid with very few edits needed. Previous edits had got up to about 40 this time only about ten. Children have more expression and are more confident and strong in what they wanted to say.

After a whole heap of revisions I eventually got ITunes to convert Garageband to an mp3. And then with a bit of help from my friends I got it to work with photos as well. As usual the solution was incredibly simple once you managed to work out the menu trail. Tip to self- export from GB to desktop m4a format in Mozilla. This podcast reflects on our trip to Point England School in Auckland. Apart from my learning directly about podcasting I felt the trip validated some of the progress we have made over the last twelve months as part of the Waimea-South ICTPD cluster.