Who wants to listen to little ole me?!

There are a lot of topics which I wish I had the time to explore and learn about. However, where do you find the time? Teachers are infamously overworked and struggle to find a work-life balance. So, when we were gifted the time to explore something we wished to learn about in this class, I was quite excited.

But where to start? I adore baking, and have always wanted to get better at the more technical aspects of pastries. I am an avid kayaker, and wish I had more time to go out on the open water and know how to recover when I flip.  I used to rollerblade every summer, but haven’t had the time in years to pick it back up. While I own a Cricut and have done numerous projects with it, I have always wanted to start working on more complicated projects. I have been having a lot of fun creating podcasts for final projects during my Masters classes, and find that some of my colleagues are interested in the topics I am learning about. Could I create a podcast for teachers?

After a little bit of consideration, I decided on learning as much as I could about podcasting. My “podcasts” have been pretty rudimentary up until this point. I have been using Canva as my creation platform and have never posted my content anywhere except in a link for my professor to look at. I am a pretty private and introverted person, so I have been really wrestling with the idea of putting my work out there for others to consume. However, there are a lot of teachers who don’t have the opportunity to take a graduate degree, or took it years ago and there are new topics that are affecting the profession today. A lot of the time, our professional development is not focused on these areas. If they are, it is sometimes not presented in a useful manner for a variety of reasons. So, if I am to actually look into creating useful content for people to access, I am going to need to research a lot of different aspects to what podcasting is all about.

I started to look around at different sites that give advice to beginners. This provided me a pathway to start educating myself on the best way to set myself up for success. After reading this article, I want to learn about different software I can use to create podcasts, sound equipment and mixing, different formats, and different platforms I could use.

I am lucky that I have a brother who is a voice actor. He has offered to work with me regarding sound engineering, software and equipment. I am looking forward to working with him on a topic that he has a lot of experience with. It will be a little difficult because he does live in Edmonton AB. However, we are both adept at Zoom, so we will set up meetings to discuss and screen share so we are able to share information.

 

 

Now, I am unsure how I am going to showcase my learning. I don’t know if I want to go the blog (or Vlog) route, or if I want to make a podcast series (that would continuously evolve with my journey) about my learning. I am going to work on this idea as I continue to learn about this topic. I have a tendency to be a perfectionist, and am overly critical when there are obvious wholes in my content. I worry that making a podcast series about learning might be too messy for me, and I will let it become a barrier and affect this journey.

Either way, I am excited to start this journey and learn!