It’s Elementary » Blog Archive » It’s Elementary Show #3 Podcasts – Just Listen to Me! If you check it out, the show is surprisingly good and we sound like we know what we’re doing, but this show had some real pain behind it…

After the sound and other technical issues from our first show, I figured it would be smoother sailing–it couldn’t get worse, could it? First, Jose who assures me that he arrives promptly at 7 a.m. to work each day, was late. Part of the problem with this is that he is doing the show with myself and two other Webcast Academy Interns, so Jose has been the fallback guy for streaming. When we started I had this vision of just being like the local news weather girl, and not having to worry my little head about the technical details of getting the show on, HAH! Now I’m knee deep in audio repeaters and Skype conferencing.

Next, I was in a training and had to rush home to make the show because Skype is blocked in my district (grrrr!). I LEFT MY LAPTOP POWER CORD AT THE TRAINING SITE! (double grrrr!) I have a desktop computer, but the sound is not working at all, so it would be impossible to do a Webcast from it. So I had like 50 minutes of power left. I called Lisa Durff and told her I would come in at literally the last minute. I don’t know if a sound check was ever done, but it was awful during the webcast. Sounds nice on the podcast? I don’t know what magic Jose performed on it, and I’m not going to ask.

Now, in the middle of this, is our famous guest. I could make this interesting and lie a lot about what a prima donna he was and how he complained about there not being virtual fruit basket in the SL lounge, but we don’t have a green room in SL and frankly Wes was the calmest person there, and a real rock during this whole chaos of just getting the show started. If your ever going to have lots of things go wrong on a live Webcast, invite Wes! He also gave a really good show about the reasons for using Podcasts in the classroom, linking what we were doing in our classrooms to learning theory in a way that was accessible.

Immediately following the show, I got a migraine (there’s a surprise!) which dogged me the next day as well.

I then saw on Wes’ site that he had posted about something I discussed with him on the show, which was using school autodial systems to send out podcasts to parents. He loved it. He also credited Maria with the idea, BUT given the poor sound quality on the Skype conference, I’m surprised he didn’t think I was Jose. I told Maria to add the link to her CV which would be really funny because her school doesn’t have an autodialer system.

About the only thing that went right was that I got in that point about the auto dialer with Wes JUST before I lost all power on my laptop. This was about typical for how things went with that show. Here’s hoping it’s smoother with Mr. Shively on the 27th.