Reflections on Teaching

How did I come up with this great idea? Hey Wes Fryer thinks it’s great, so I’m not gonna argue. He can call me Maria, heck he can call me Jose if he’s gonna say nice stuff like this…

School finance in California is a many-headed hydra. Basically, the money comes from the state level, down to local schools (after going up from local property taxes, but I digress and it’s a lot more complicated than even that). The state pays schools based on seat time, so if a child is not in school, that is money lost to that school. This creates an incentive for schools to “improve” attendance. One tool in the repertoire is the auto dial or robo call system. My district has it, the district where we live and where my son attends school has it. Schools make attempts to use it for community communication, like letting parents know about upcoming events, or if there has been a safety incident at the school. My son’s principal was a little over fond of it last year, and the messages delivered are still basically a phone call.

I was trying to use it to send out general messages to parents about changes in homework, or other news. I was watching the attendance clerk set up the phone call. First she would set up the message on the web site for the service, then she would get an id# for the message, call the service and punch in the code, and record the message. They would then send her an audio file over the web site based on the phone call. An uncompressed wav file. She would then check the sound quality on the file, and make some selections on the Web site about who to send it out to, and voila, message sent to parents.

I saw her play the file to check it in Windows Media player. “HEY!” I thought, I could make a wav file! I had already been playing with podcasting and recording a little at that point, so I knew it was do able. The only question was, if I made the wav file, would it upload to the Web site? I asked her to try, and bless Maria’s heart (Maria my old attendance clerk, not Maria Knee) she did. It worked!

Here is what you will need:

1. A true uncompressed wav file. Some MP3 players (the cheap one’s like what I have) create semi-compressed wav files.
2. A sound file that is 60 seconds or less in length.

The last requirement means you have to have a tight show. Think of it like the four slides? If your school has an auto-dialer system, and you have a lot families without Internet access, this is a great way to share the podcasts with them. Remember, even if they don’t have regular access to computers, you should still be posting to the Web if you can because even if they can’t listen to it, they will like the idea of it being there.