I am delighted to welcome John Johnston, an Education ICT Development Officer in North Lanarkshire, Scotland for a guest post. John first inspired me to start blogging and has continued to do so ever since then. It is a great pleasure to have him as a guest explaining about another of his innovative projects: EDUtalk.

I’ve just found out that I am not going to make it to BETT this year, chief among the many disappointments is that I am not going to get face to face time with many of the folk I know through blogs and twitter and that I will not get the chance to do some recording and evangelising for EDUtalk.cc.

Fortunately Tom has given me the chance to rectify this and fulfil both of these ambitions at once in another way. If through this blog post I can persuade some BETT attendees to produce some audio for EDUtalk I will have evangelised EDUtalk. Listening to reports, reflections, conversations and interviews will add an extra dimension to the blog posts and tweets I will no doubt read in the near future.

What is EDutalk?

edutalkcard4

Edutalk builds on a project at the Scottish Learning Festival 09 SLFtalk. SLFtalk collected short pieces of audio from a wide range of educators at the SLF and published them on SLFtalk. The audio was recoded on a range of devices, mostly mobile, and posted through a variety of services.

EDUtalk was started to continue to give educators an opportunity to create or listen to podcasts created on the hoof. We, David Noble and myself, see this as ‘guerrilla podcasting’ an alternative to heavier more complex and official channels. In 2010 we are running a EDUtalk365 project in the hope of getting one podcast for every day published on EDUtalk, BETT hopefully gives us an opportunity to keep up the pace.

At the end of 2009 we ran TeachMeet Mobile, a new format of TeachMeet, where contributors produced live audio which became episodes of EDUtalk365.

How to EDutalk

  • Pick up the phone: Use Gabcast. We have a gabcast channel whose content is automatically sent to EDUtalk, see the Gabcast instructions.. All you do is phone up and talk, gabcast and EDUtalk do the rest.
  • Tag it: Use AudioBoo or ipadio and tag your content edutalk. The podcasts will be automatically posted to EDUtalk.
  • Email it: Email any audio to post@EDUtalk.posterous.com. Record on an mp3 player, your computer or phone. Email it as an attachment and it will be published.

Full instructions for publishing audio by these and other methods can be found on EDUtalk.

After you send in your recording it is put in the moderation queue for EDUtalk, not so that we can censor or edit it, just to avoid publishing the inevitable spam. If you are recording someone else make sure they have given permission to publish (you should be able to make this clear in the audio). All audio published on the site is published under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland License. At SLF we manage to keep the delay in publishing to a minimum and plan to do the same during BETT.

Why EDUtalk?

Podcasting is a powerful medium. David and I believe that hearing someone speak adds an extra dimension. Although podcasting can be criticised as slower than reading and harder to link from it has the advantage of adding emotional emphasis, portability and you can listen while doing something else. Try reading a blog post while washing the dishes.

We think EDUtalk ‘lowers the bar’ to publishing a variety of audio online and we hope that others experiment with these ways of gathering voices. By publishing you audio on EDUtalk you gain distribution, an audience and due to the CC license you can easily republish elsewhere if you like. We also hope that collecting a mix of different voices for all areas of education will make compelling listening.

What to EDUtalk?

Typical EDUtalk episodes are short, 1 – 8 minutes long and cover a wide range of topics. The focus for EDUtalk365 is curriculum change. So far contributions have included:

  • Contributors own thoughts and experiences
  • Workshops and Keynotes at conferences
  • A conversation with or between colleagues
  • An interview with someone with an interesting insight into, or experience of, curriculum change
  • Discussions with students
  • Audio resources which can be used by students or other professionals.

David has produced some prompts which you may find useful when planning the content of the audio that you are contributing:

  • How are you/they engaging with the changing curriculum? How are you/they changing the opportunities which you/they provide for your/their learners?
  • What differences have you/they noticed so far? How are learners responding? What challenges do you/they envisage?
  • Which resources are effective for you/them and may be of interest to others?
  • What are your/their reflections on curriculum change so far?
  • Who or what has inspired you/them lately?

EDUtalk at TeachMeet BETT

Although I will not be at BETT David will. As well as recording his own and other peoples’ thoughts, he will be attending TeachMeet BETT and hopes to get permission from the presenters to record their audio and publish it over the next few days at EDUtalk.

We hope that EDUtalk will prove a useful resource for sharing idea and information from BETT and that you will contribute to it.

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