Podcasting

The podcast I chose to check out is an education based show called "Hall Pass" hosted by Mike Dionne, a technology teacher. The neat thing about this podcast is that in his most recent posts he is covering a great deal of things that we are learning about in class right now. He has episodes on social bookmarking, photo shop, and even podcasting itself.

The most interesting things he talks about are the ways in which he applies these tools in his own classrooms. The most interesting use comes from his photo shop episode where he describes a project where the students were asked to morph the faces of teachers in the building. Not that this is a particularly useful vocational skill to learn (morphing faces that is, not photo shop itself) but it is an original idea and one that promoted nearly 100% cooperation from his students due to their high interest level. That's always something to shoot for.

His show is a bit lackluster on the whole, and he doesn't update very often, so I had to check out past episodes rather than subscribe to a daily feed, and his annoying commercial for his sponsor took up a full minute of each episode. However, there is quality information in his short lectures and it really opened my mind to a brand new world of possible information waiting to be retrieved at a simple click.