Thing #21 Creating A Pod Cast

I was scared of this thing for some reason, but I ended up having a blast with it!  My hardest task here was to figure out what I wanted to make the pod cast about.  After a lot of thought, I decided to make one about rounding off whole numbers which is historically rather difficult for third graders--they get it when they learn to round off for one place, but then ask them to round to a different place and they are totally lost.  I learned this technique a long time ago--from whom, I can't say, so I can't credit it to anyone, but it's a fun way for the kids to learn rounding and with this technique, they seem to be able to accomplish the task no matter what place I ask them to round the number to.  Anyway, I made a power point presentation, then I used the Screencast-o-matic  to make it into a video, which I uploaded to YouTube and then embedded into my face of the classroom blog, Literacy Lane.
Here is the url for it on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoKC20wN0yI
I have licensed it with the following creative commons license:

Cinderella Rounding by Susi Meagher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The next part of the assignment was to share it with friends or kids and get some feedback.  Since it is a Sunday, I posted it on my favorite sphynx blog site, Sphynx Lair and asked for feedback.  One lady showed it to her kids and I got mixed reviews.  Some of the comments were that everyone seemed to like the idea and the narration, good speed, fun use of the fairy tale.  But one of the kids thought there was too much text to read on each screen.  Another liked it all, but without a single exception, everyone found the yellow circle on the cursor to be distracting.  I have to agree, so, before I actually share it with parents and students,  I will have to change that.
I enjoyed making it and when I get those few kinks worked out, I can see myself using this quite a lot to remediate, stretch and enhance skills I am teaching in my groups, so that the learning can continue outside my four walls.  I can see me using this with math remediation groups-demonstrating difficult concepts, I can see a lot of uses for podcasts in phonics or grammar conventions.  Demonstrating the sound/symbol correspondance of the consonant blend or digraph we studied in our lesson today, how to make plural a noun ending in "y", concepts of non-fiction print, and directions on just about anything.  And with the Screencast-o-matic, I can make fun and easy little five minute how-to hints to post with a featured weekly skill on my classroom blog. 
This has been a great class, chock filled with great ideas and things every teacher ought to know.  Thanks for helping me creep into the 21st century...and let's hope I continue to grow in my technology
skills long after I have turned in my final paper.   It's been an honor learning with and from you, Ron!