I’m an administrative principal, which gives me very little opportunity to regularly work with classes so I’m always looking for opportunities to work with groups of pupils where, if I’m not available for some reason, it’s not affecting the teacher too much. I decided I’d take 6 students to set up a podcast and try and record an episode once a month. Here’s what I learned from our first episode.
Equipment
The only equipment we used was a decent microphone. I popped into a music shop and asked them for a decent mic for podcasting and got one for around €150.
Software
Audacity all the way. Why pay when Audacity is so good!
Communication
As I don’t have daily access to the pupils, we did most of our communication and planning through a Google Classroom. This worked really well.
Podcast Site
We used Soundcloud because our podcasts are short. However, if we had have done better research we probably would have used Buzzsprout, Podbean or Libsyn. Soundcloud is fine for the moment though.
Title Music
We created one in Google Experiments and recorded it using the Microphone. It came out well.
Things that worked for us
We tried to meet once a week and plan what everyone was going to do. We also planned on keeping the podcast simple and short. There are 3 parts to it and it all lasts about 5 minutes.
Issues
Probably like all projects, some pupils took it more seriously than others. This meant we missed our planned date for our podcast. When the pupils realised they were the ones that had to make sure things were on time, things started working again.