Core Business

Today was our first day of the Northland Digital Fluency Intensive Cohort#1 for 2020.  Our group is made up of 15 primary, secondary school teachers and principals, from as far north as Paparore School to Bay of Islands who kindly hosted us in one of their recently upgraded classrooms.
I do enjoy the DFI, it's a real highlight of my week and brings with it a great opportunity to network with teachers in the Manaiakalani Outreach schools from both the Te Hiku and Kaikohekohe cluster.

Dorothy Burt, the Manaiakalani Education Programme Lead was with us and started the day with the origins of Manaiakalani since its inception. Although I've heard Dorothy present this a few times now there is always something for me to take away. 
Today it was Dorothy's innovative pedagogy with her student created podcasts which she started back in 2006.   Getting students to create their own podcasts was an engaging activity which helped to  improve students reading. 
Reflecting back on my own teaching practice back then, I was reminded of a dream I had to create a student radio station that could be broadcast throughout the school and to the wider community.  Back then of course, it was involved a fairly extensive process that involved procuring an unused FM frequency along with the sourcing of some expensive equipment to enable a big enough broadcast reach.

Now of course, technology has shifted so far that many of these barriers are removed.  There are plenty of podcast sites that provide an integrated platform for uploading and sharing self-made audio sound bites.  A quick search brought up How to Start a Podcast and while this site is aimed more at the adult reader, it's got some good references that I may well come back to. 
Talking some more with Dorothy today about this, got me thinking about how I could engage students reading by the creation of their own podcasts.  The possibilities are endless really.  For example, at high school level, students could be tasked with creating a podcast series as a class on a given topic, they could interview each other or better still record interviews with outside experts or members of their own community.  That's taking it off in another direction altogether of course.  A learning opportunity not only for content of a given topic but also students will need to write a script, think about what order they will present ideas, add audio effects and so on to make it an entertaining listen. 
Plenty of ideas bubbling around for me to investigate further and which may fit quite nicely for my assignment for Teaching Computing Programming.