Thunder

I have been working with Lea and Ollie at Thomas Adams school in Wem today, they are both geography teachers.

The purpose of the afternoon was to start to produce year 11 revision podcasts, here are there first attempts.

Tectonics.m4a and Settlements.m4a (needs iTunes or Quicktime to play)

There was lots of discussion about the following:

• Length of the podcast - how long should a podcast be, what the guys thought would be a 2 minute podcast rapidly became 4 minutes. At first they were thinking about 10 minute episodes, but in the end we believed that would be too long and we should go for short sharp shows.
• Speed of voice - a couple of times Ollie got into full stride and was rattling through his notes, at some points they speech might have been too fast. We wondered what the students would do with the podcast, if they were going to take notes then we really would need to speak at a slow pace so they could keep up.
• Images - how many images should be used? Should the track have no images at points? We didn’t really come to a consensus on this, I personally like there to be lots of images to try and keep up the pace of the show.
• Hyperlinks - it is worth adding hyperlinks from the enhanced podcast to point to written notes to support the audio. We felt that this would be the next step in out journey, for now we would just put up the podcast.
• Student podcasts - after certain topics of work this year they will get students to produce a podcast as an assessment activity - these podcasts could start to form a set of revision notes for other students.

It would be nice to hear other peoples thoughts on the discussion points above. If you have time it would be great if you could leave a note about their podcasts on their Geograhy blog at http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk

UPDATE: Lea has now reproduced his Tectonics podcast and has uploaded it to his blog (http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk) - I think he has a talent for it, what do you reckon?