Category Archives: Netcast

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 75

Netcast No Comments

Click to listenMore from the Northeast Regional DEN Event … now with 100% better audio quality!

It’s after midnight, so it’s a little late in the day for podcasting (or early, depending on your perspective), but here I am. I was tempted to just whip out my phone and do another quick and dirty recording, but instead I decided to belay any fears that I was going to stick to the low quality format from Monday.

It’s taken a while for me to make my podcasts sound as good as they do, and while I know they still have room for improvement, I don’t really feel like taking a permanent step backward in quality.

Today was the last full day of the Northeast Regional DEN Event, so most of us spent our time working on our team projects. Not me, however. I was a small group co-leader along with Kristin (a great DEN member whose last name I won’t try to pronounce), and as such we didn’t have teams.

Instead, I gave technical assistance to a few teams while working on my own projects. Monday’s podcasts were just one of my activities, as I’ve also recorded a Mini Lesson or two that will find their way onto my website sooner or later.

My biggest project, however, was to summarize this week using video and still images. I’ll save my comments on that for a later date, since this event is about more than just me.

After dinner today, Will Richardson (yes, THE Will Richardson) gave a presentation to the DEN attendees. I was unable to see it due to a personal emergency, but I did manage to snag autographed copies of his book for my wife and myself. (I’m also pleased that he remembered me from MICCA).

I’ve already started reading Mr. Richardson’s book, and I must say that it fails to do what most books on educational technology do. Mainly, it doesn’t feel like I’m reading a VCR manual. It’s almost as if Will Richardson wrote the book for people to read, rather than just put it on their bookshelves to make themselves feel important. I’ll elaborate further once I’ve read through a few more chapters.

The grand finale of the evening was movie night. The team projects were presented to great and well deserved applause. Even though many of these teachers had never used iMovie or Movie Maker before, they were still able to produce informative and aesthetically pleasing presentations. I can only hope that the teachers that attended this conference are as eager to share their newfound skills with their coworkers in September as they are today. I can’t wait for them to show up online so I can link to them.

… I’ll have to bug Lance about that.

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Academic Aesthetic Podcast 73

Netcast Technology No Comments

Click to listenToday I talk about the third and final part of my summer listening list: “Radio Leo.”

Hello to everyone, and congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Steve Dembo . For more details, head over to Teach42.com.

Next week I plan to be podcasting from the Northeast Regional DEN Event at Valley Forge, but today I’d like to continue with my summer listening list.

The first true podcast (as in audio distributed via an RSS feed) I ever listened to was Leo Laporte’s weekend radio show, “The Tech Guy on KFI.” Far from limiting himself, Mr. Laporte has expanded his domain to a variety of podcasts that usually update on a weekly basis. All of them are centered on technology, but each has a different cohost and covers a different aspect of it.

My favorites include:

  • This Week in Tech (the flagship podcast, where Leo and others discuss the tech news from the past week)
  • Inside the Net with Amber MacArthur (Amber interviews people from different web based companies)
  • Security Now with Steve Gibson (guess what this one’s about)
  • The Daily Giz Wiz with Dick DeBartolo (this one has little educational value, but it’s so darn fun so I still like it)

Mr. Laporte does maintain a website where you can subscribe to his podcasts individually, along with one RSS feed called “Radio Leo.” That one’s my choice, because it includes all of his podcasts in a single RSS feed.

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 72

Art Netcast 2 Comments

Click to listenIn my 72nd podcast I continue talking about my “Summer Listening List,” focusing on Chris Marquardt’s “Tips From the Top Floor.”

I’m beginning to get psyched for the Northeast Regional DEN Event in Valley Forge. I won’t say too much about it now, but I will post a link to the event’s wiki.

Instead, I’d like to talk about part two of my summer listening list. Last time I plugged History According to Bob, which is a great resource for anyone interested in history. Today, let’s talk digital photography.

With the proliferation of camera phones and photo sharing sites like Flickr, it’s obvious that there are many more people getting interested in the digital side of photography. Alas, like in all things, having the ability to do something is not the same as knowing how to do it well. (Have you ever seen a PowerPoint presentation that was so bad it hurt your eyes to look at it, in spite of the useful information it contained? I have.)

Enter Chris Marquardt, master of both sound and photography. First from his home in southern Germany and now from his studio in … southern Germany, Chris produces his Tips From the Top Floor three times a week.

Rather than focus on just the high end professional stuff, Tips From the Top Floor covers the gamut from point and click camera phones to 8 megapixel Nikon DSLRs, with some image manipulation tips using Photoshop and GIMP for good measure.

Rather than stop there, you can also find a thriving forum on his site that discusses photography news, tips, tricks, and is more than willing to offer constructive criticism for your own photos.

If you have any interest in the medium of digital photography, you should really check this one out.

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 71

Education Netcast No Comments

Click to listenIn my 71st podcast I begin going over my summer listening list.

Teachers (at least the good ones) give it their all during the school year. For 180 days, not including weekends and holidays, we grade tests, write lesson plans, and brave rooms full of thirty screaming children armed with only a collection of mismatched paintbrushes, watercolors, and enough blank paper for every kid to have one sheet.

Then summer hits, and we crawl into our dens to hibernate through the warm summer months until the first cries of back to school sales wake us from our slumber.

Ok, maybe we don’t spend the whole time sleeping, but I would be lying if I said I missed getting up before the sun every day. As someone who gets most of his work done in the morning, this means that my productivity has taken a huge downturn of late.

I’m not alone in this – my usual edu-blogs and edu-podcasts have had a marked decline in postings. I’m not shocked by this – after all, it’s summer. We’re on vacation, aren’t we?

Lucky for me, there are still plenty of podcasts out there that are educational, yet aren’t done by teachers who have chosen to hibernate. (That’s one way of saying that they still update regularly.)

So, for my next few podcasts I think I’ll share some of my other favorites with you. Think of this as my summer listening list.

First up is one of my all time favorite podcasts: History According to Bob is the brain child of a history teacher named … Bob. Six days a week (sometimes seven, if he has something special like a video) Bob graces the internet with a 5-20 minute segment on a history topic, from Austria to the Zoroastrians.

I’ve been a history buff since I was little, and I just love learning new things about all kinds of topics. You’d also be surprised at how many times I’ve used the things he’s podcasted in an art lesson.

My only complaint is that he doesn’t leave his podcasts up forever. Once he has a bunch of them on his site, he takes them down and combines them into a CD that you can purchase. This is a neat way to earn revenue, I’m sure, but when I decide on the spur of the moment that I want to hear is podcast on the life of Benjamin Franklin I really don’t want to have to wait for it to be shipped.

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 70

Netcast No Comments

Click to listenToday’s podcast‘s subject was changed at the last moment, as I thought this was a good time to remind everyone to think about who their audience is – that task is more important than you might realize.

Remember a podcast or two ago when I talked about Flickr blocking some pictures? Looks like I actually scooped Wired News, as today they posted an article on the exact same thing. Granted, they had the clout to interview some of the big names out there, but at least I actually mentioned it before them.

Nowadays there appears to be a switch so far as content providing web sites are concerned. In the past, most site administrators picked their content carefully, selecting images or words that fit with their own vision of what they wanted. Users still had the ability to upload their own content, but for the most part that was limited to Usenet and certain sections of AOL.

Now, it seems content management is doing a flip-flop. Taking a page out of Wikipedia‘s book (so to speak), many websites now let you upload or select your own content. Digg, del.icio.us, and YouTube aren’t big hits because they have great editors, but because everything on them has been user selected.

But this change of events is not a full 180 degree turn, as evidenced by Flickr’s practice of censoring. Wikipedia has some editors as well, which go through and weed out the entries that just don’t belong in an encyclopedia.

It’s as if these content collecting sites are parents caring for their children – they’re willing to let their kids run all over the place, but little Billy and Tammy are still going to get a scolding the next time they follow a ball out into the street.

This makes sense to me. As an art teacher I often try to find ways for my students to express themselves creatively. It often comes as a shock to them when I tell them they’re free to choose what to draw, although I do stipulate that “pictures of the art teacher getting beat up aren’t allowed.”

Whenever content creators do the thing they do, they should always remember their audience. Since I always hang up finished projects, the audience for my lessons is the entire building. Students drawing pictures of guns or other students getting hurt get at the very least a lecture and at most … well, let’s not go there.

If you post a picture to Flickr, video to YouTube, or so on, your audience is the entire internet – including the people who own those servers. If you put something there that they don’t like, don’t be surprised if it disappears.

And of course, the same is true for the world of blogging. Unless you have some way of password protecting your postings, your blog’s audience is everyone with an internet connection – including that administrator and/or coworker you just satirized in a rather catchy limerick. Believe me, people have been fired for less.

Academic Aesthetic Podcast 69

Art Netcast No Comments

Click to listenI’ve been putting some thought into my mini lessons.

If you’ve been subscribed to my site for a while then you’ve seen the five short videos I’ve done to teach different projects that I thought were neat and / or unique.

You’ve also noticed that I haven’t done any for quite some time.

I could tell you that it’s because I haven’t had the time. After all, it takes a lot longer to process video than it does to process audio. I could also say that some computer problems a while back caused a long delay, as I had to install a new hard drive and do a reinstall or three this year.

These are all partially true reasons, but none of them is the real one.

The truth is, I’ve been lazy and uninspired.

But I have an idea. I want to do some more mini lessons next year, but instead of my own ideas I think I’ll get the Art Club involved.

Students have a lot of cool ideas, and I’d love to give them a format to share them. I already tried it this year with a podcast, but if I start early enough next year I should be able to get several episodes out each marking period.

I think I’ll stick with the same format, however – and by that I mean with the camera focussed on the art project and the student sitting out of sight. I think they’ll feel much more comfortable if they know that they don’t have to be in front of the camera, and with my concerns for student safety, I’ll feel much more comfortable then them because of the same thing.

Who knows? At the end I might even be able to hand out CDs with all of that year’s mini lessons burned onto them as a keepsake. We’ll see how that turns out.

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