slidecast/podcast

What a busy day, the AS students made their first slidecast and I’m quite pleased with how smoothly it went to be honest. Slidecasting is a weird and lovely mash up of a powerpoint (blech) and a podcast. I dislike powerpoint this is well documented, but I’m finding slideshare really useful. I’ve been trying to keep up the wiki, doing some of it myself, and forcing students to do the rest. Because you can upload PDF’s to it, I’ve been doing all task sheets through pages, saving them as PDF files and uploading them to slideshare. This means I can embed them in the wiki, so when people are absent or lose their sheets, they have no excuses. It’s both wicked and delicious.

The slidecast was homework – About once a month or so I do an audit with the students, I’ve been working on ‘making notes’ with them (not taking notes) so I make sure they have a full set of those, any additional tasks and we then spend the lesson making revision resources as we go along. The slidecast was aimed to be a useful revision resource that could be embedded in the wiki. The sweet girl who did the voice-over for this came to see me and I loaned her the headphones, mic and laptop (supervised in the office I might add) to get on with the recording. I think for a first time it was excellent, and I’m really pleased with how easy it was to create.

For my BTEC First group we had spent the lesson looking at whether differences or similarities in organisms has a bigger impact in terms of classification. I decided to couple this task with some key skills work and hold a group discussion. The discussion was recorded and the students came up with their own rules for the talk that generally all centred around politeness. They were quite shy but again, I’m really very pleased with how it turned out. You can download it here .