Podcasting power

I watch a lot of TED talks. I'll have to post on that another time. I also started listening to economics podcast so that I would get ideas for teaching my econ class. I shared one with my class once. And they really liked it, so, I'm like "Self, great day!" (to quote my favorite economics professor). But it's in a format that is hard to do in a classroom, so I wanted to make it work somehow. So, I thought about TED. TED is video, and has subtitles (the kids have a hard time with British accents), so I've shared a couple videos and had some success. But I still wanted to work in some of the audio podcasts, especially since the kids wanted me to. So again, I turned to TED. There was a talk on Changing Education Paradigms, and the cool thing was that instead of a fancy powerpoint, there was live illustration visualizing the things he talked about. It was a living storyboard for his talk. That gave me an idea.

I have a SmartBoard. So, I thought that I would live-illustrate a podcast. I proposed this to the kids, and asked if they thought it was a good idea. It was the last week of school for my seniors, so they didn't care. They thought anything was a great idea. So I did it. A little ways into it stopped and asked if it was working, and they said it was. I also admitted to them that this was WAY beyond being out of my comfort zone, but that I was doing it for them. I mean, it was NOT anything spectacular, but it wasn't distracting. So they either just listened, or they listened and watched.

So, here are the screen shots of my live-illustrated podcast, which you can listen to here.