An Education in Education

I spent some time the past few weeks meeting with students and educators in a wide variety of age groups, introducing webcasts. I first spent a morning talking to my son’s First grade class at Angier Elementary school. We had a “What Does Your Parent Do All Day” meeting, sort of like bring your child to work day, but opposite.

I wasn’t quite sure how to explain Webcasting, but after a few animated PowerPoint slides explaining why Evan’s lemonade stand would be more successful than Jonah’s if only he only did a webcast, I think they got it. Wow what energy from that group! and great questions!

Later that night, more than half the class and parents joined me for an actual webcast. I asked a poll question about what was their favorite baseball team, Red Sox of course!, and had a few of them speak and ask me questions.

A week back I met with Sarah Burrows, Internship Program Director of Simmons College, a small women's college in the heart of Boston, noted for its emphasis on a strong arts and sciences, undergraduate education. I’d been speaking with Sarah about introducing webcasts, and more specifically my idea of ResuMecasts to her students to see if they would be interested in my idea to enhance their resume’s & portfolio by embedding a personal audio/visual message.

Sarah told me that most of their senior students were already into Face Book, MySpace or had a website and lacked the resources, usually both: Time & money to try something new. Fair enough, we still may explore this next year with Sophomores & Juniors, maybe offer it as part of an internship program….

Yesterday, I visited Newton South High School, home of the Lions. It’s an impression institution where my older son Drew will be a freshman next year. I met with a mix of freshman to seniors from Brian Hammel, head of the business department, and a class from Carol Ober, head of the Media Lab.

Carol’s group had just completed their 11th Annual Animation Festival Check it out at http://www.nshsmedialab.com/, so I wanted to talk to the creative sorts about MeCasts and WeCasts, my concept for integrating visuals with narration to explain their portfolios and other personal experiences.

Brian’s group offers Intro to Business, Marketing and even a class on Entrpreneurship, He’s using an online platform called Moodle…which is a Course Management System also know as a Virtual Learning Environment. It’s a Free web application that educators can use to create online learning sites. He posts assignments then students can work at their own pace. Brian can track progress and provide feedback online.

All his students have their own blogs, surely not my Father’s High school, nor mine! Check it out at www.moodle.org

I spent about an hour talking, demonstrating and answering great questions from an interested and somewhat enthusiastic group (they are teenagers after all.)

I’ve offered to help produce a webcast for any students if they’d like to try it out. School’s out in a few weeks so I don’t expect any takers now, but we’ll pick it up in the fall and see what happens. Overall, these were all great learning experiences for me, evangelizing about webcasting from grades 1 to 12.

After all, you ain’t living if you ain’t learnin’