This Monday I have the good fortune to be conducting a podcasting workshop for staff at Hougang Primary School in Singapore. Thirty staff will be attending a morning session and fifty staff in the afternoon. It will be quite a day.

The teachers will be working with MacBooks and as a result I shall be sharing GarageBand (guide), ProfCast (guide) and Audacity (guide) with the teachers in addition to a variety of strategies and tactics. I will share some Windows based solutions (guide) as well.

Podcasting is an interesting beast. Students at our school have created podcasts, the first back in 2005. Where are they now? On a server, a back-up somewhere. This is often the way with projects, technology and otherwise.

Podcasting. Needs focus. Collaboration. Longevity. Podcasts can become lost, buried, discarded. Focus and direction can give podcasts life.

Years ago I had the chance to observe and work with a group of Year 6  students on a web publishing project. It was Woodlands Primary School. About 1999. Small groups within created a site dedicated to one aspect of a course that was to be examined at the end of the year. During the following year the next cohort further developed the web sites and added audio and visual components. The site evolved and was developed by successive students. It evolved a life of its own.

This is the type of approach I like to see with podcasting projects. Longevity. Students can be rostered to create a podcast on a specific topic scheduled for publication at a particular time of year that relates to the course structure.

I shall write more on this topic during the coming days. Resources for the podcasting workshop can be downloaded from this page.