Baldev Singh and Doug Dickinson @ The Guardian, Feb 8th 2008

Many thanks to Lucy Haire, Emma Drury, Margaret Holborn and colleagues at Learnnewsdesk from the Guardian for helping arrange a terrific half-day conference entitled “Raising achievement through podcasting” at the Newsroom venue in central London on Friday last week, which was sponsored by Softease.

Over 80 people packed the seminar room to hear a number of speakers entertain and inform throughout the morning. First up was Baldev Singh. Although Baldev’s job title is Head of Strategic Development at Imagine Education, his affable self-description of being more ‘just a teacher who is having fun‘ set the tone for a fast-paced and entertaining half-hour illlustrating many emerging classroom technologies (and even showing one of my favourite You Tube videos!). Baldev also pointed out, however, that its not about the ‘tech’ but the ‘teach’, and that pedagogy has to develop along with technology for these new tools to be truly effective.

Next up was our very own Doug Dickinson who also entertained in typical fashion, enlisting audience participation for the creation of a podcast with Podium that was published live to the web during the session, as well as playing award-winning podcasts made by schools across the country.His final plea was also significant - that podcasting not become another ‘tie dying’ fad, i.e. something that only gets tried once in school and then is discarded. This is an important theme worthy of a longer post as Doug is spot on. The impact of recorded audio is so significant to the learning and enjoyment of young people that it simply can’t be allowed to be ignored! Sean O’Sullivan spoke later during the morning and his testimony spoke volumes about the impact that recording audio has had on some of the pupils at the Frank Wise Special School in Banbury, Oxfordshire.Some of their pupils have severe learning difficulties including verbalization. The use of recorded audio and podcasting has literally help transform some of these children’s learning experiences.In one activity children reflected back on each other’s recorded words (are the voices loud enough, clear enough? etc). Some non-verbal pupils were able to have their own audio clips edited together to form whole sentences. In this way they were able to listen to themselves speak fluently - in some instances for the first time.I immediately thought back to the work of Dan Plane at the Hatton Special school in Redbridge, where pupils with similar learning difficulties have found podcasting to be transformational for their learning experience.Thank you once again to the Learnnewsdesk team - we look forward to a follow-up event later in the year!