My co-worker (Estee Williams) and I just wrapped up our ninth episode of the P.O.D.C.A.T.S podcast (Personal on Demand Curriculum and Technology Show).
We started this at the beginning of the school year as a fun and different way to provide tech PD to our teachers. We wanted to see if there was an audience for it as well as learn some new skills that we could use in the classroom.
It has been challenging these past two month as we have had to record from our separate homes, when we had been recording in person. We did like the challenge though and could now use our new skills to interview folks from around the country if needed.
Sadly, we've decided to table our Podcast for next year in lieu of some other tech PD ideas we would like to try.
I thought, as we are closing out this experiment, I would highlight what we did and used tech wise in case anyone wanted to give it a try.
The first thing we did was develop our name, logo, and show format. We used the site Fiverr to get a logo made and I wrote about that experience earlier in the year. We based our format off of cat terms since we are both cat owners and we were calling our show the PODCATS.
We started with Un-FUR-gettable Tech Updates then moved into Recent HISS-tory - where we both highlighted something we had done in the previous month. We called our main segment PAW-sitive Points and transitioned from there to our PURR-suation section - where we both highlighted a tech tool to try in the coming month. Finally we had a CAT-ch All for extras and reminders. It was very helpful for both of us to have structure.
We broke up the responsibility for the show. We both contributed to the script which we wrote in Google Docs so we could both add and edit to it. We generally had a theme for the month in our main segment (Back-to-School, Paperless, etc.). Estee handled the editing and getting the final show published while I put together the monthly show notes in the Google Site we set up for it.
We met once a month, all day, typically we worked on the script in the morning and recorded in the afternoon after which we worked on edits and show notes. We blocked out those days on our calendars and found a quite place to work without interruptions. We rarely ever got everything done in one day. Depending on the time of the month we would either finish at home or our next work day.
Our fanciest purchase was a Yeti microphone with filter. We got our supervisor to purchase it and it is being used as a loaner for conference calls as well as podcasting (we reserve it on our recording day - once a month). The last two months, with our shelter in place orders, we both used our apple head phones with built in microphone..so you don't need anything fancy but we definitely needed something better than our built in computer microphone!
On a whim I made a sound board by hot gluing acoustical foam to a science fair board. I am not sure that was really needed...I was just trying it out after seeing this video about making your own isolation booth for recording. We certainly didn't use it the last two month in the midst of social distancing and we were fine.
Estee used Adobe Audition to edit our recording. She personally had a paid subscription prior to us starting and she was familiar with it. If she didn't have that we would have use Audacity, which is a free program you can download to any computer. There are LOTS of tutorials on how to use Audacity on YouTube if you go that route. I wound up using Audacity for some student broadcasts and I found it simple to use (after I had watched a few tutorials).
She used the website http://buzzsprout.com/
to upload and push out the podcast (we had it sent to Apple Podcast, Spotify, as well as having it hosted on the buzzsprout site). It walks you through everything once you
make your account. The free account has some limitations, i.e. you can
only have episodes live for 90 days. To counter that she always uploaded a copy to Google Drive
and linked that on our website so people would have a way to go back and listen.
We used Google Sites to create our website which hosted our show notes which gave listeners a place to go for more information. The site is free and very easy to use. I used the script as my guide for what to put on the site. You can use
a bit.ly or tinyurl to make a short link without having to buy a domain. We set up our site address to be: tinyurl.com/BCSDPodcats which is a lot better than the actual web address of: https://sites.google.com/beaufortschools.org/podcats/home
Last month, we used https://zencastr.com/
to record which basically opens up a voice chat channel that you can record as
needed. Each time you record and stop, you get a new clip. Estee downloaded all the
clips when we were done and uploaded them into her Adobe program.
This month, we used Zoom which allows you to record up to 40
minutes for free normally and is unlimited on time for now (during the Covid 19 crisis). Estee liked that better
because the audio ended up better and she could download it all in one file
despite pausing. She chose to save locally versus in the cloud (which is an option with a paid Zoom account, which we currently have). The free Zoom account will only let you save locally on your computer.
We communicated our latest episodes through our EdTech month newsletter, our district EdTech Facebook group, and on Twitter. We developed our own Twitter account for the show - https://twitter.com/BCSDpodcats which we both had editing right to.
This may seem like a lot but once we got the first couple of episodes under our belt we had a routine established that worked for us.
If you want to try podcasting I would definitely recommend finding a like minded partner so you aren't burdened with all the work and start with a once a month podcast verses a weekly show.
Overall it was a great experience and we have a lot more skills to offer to schools/teachers who may want to try something similar in the future.
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