Podcasting London? Livecast from London!
To start of with me. I am an EFL teacher to Flemish mother tongue students.
Every year we take our fourth graders (15-16 yo) on a three day trip to London. Last year we got into a project with Kurt Klynen's ICT-atelier. We got to use their iPod-lab to take along. Next to taking the students to see several landmarks of London, they had to street interview other tourists, typical Londoners and UK-citizens about different topics linked to UK lifestyle. We were in luck as we were in London in the week leading up to elections.
After returning to good old Hamme, home to my school. Our students had to cut, reframe and organise their interviews into a ten minute radio show. They had to use iLife's Garageband to do so. For most of them it was an introduction to working on a Mac. A happy introduction.
On average it took a group of four students 30 minutes to figure out how to operate a Mac, sync their interview from the iPod touch to the machine, import them into Grageband and start editing. After working for another three hours most of them had edited a nearly professional radio show about their trip to London. Garageband also offered them the possibilty to include pictures into their podcast. You can download an example here.
It turned out the project had an immense effect on both students and teacher. I had been accompanying foreign language trips for several years but had never seen students speaking that much of a foreign language on one of these trips. They were motivated to speak to people, interview them. They suddenly lost all their fear to simply utter a word in a foreign language. I found that some students were assessing progress bigger than ever.
Yes, we're going to London again this year. Yes, we want to do this project again, but this time we want to take this a step further.
Using modern technology, I is very well possible to report almost live from London to parents, teachres, students back home. All you need is a connection to the internet from a mobile device to post the interviews, photos and impressions to, let us say, tumblr...
Getting a SIM card which only supports data connections is quite easy. The UK offers several providers that sell their prepaid SIMs in shops around London. For about 10 quid you get a two month's worth of 2GB.
Getting devices is a different story. It would be excellent we were eable to use iPhones as we could just use them as iPod touches with an extra. But as an iPhone tops up to about € 500 in Belgium, this is a bit of a problem.
Next step is to negotiate with Apple to see if we can get some machines to use for this project. I hope it will work.
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