On Monday, October 12, it was time for another of our BeSmartOnAir Live YouTube sessions: I was lucky to get Zack Gilbert and Bjorn Behrendt to join me in the StreamYard studio. Both of these guys are definitely quite aways from my own, very Nordic European location but actually not very far from each other in the US.
It was super interesting to hear about the work – and, in general, life – situation of both Zack and Bjorn. So very different from Sweden! Zack has been doing the remote-education-thing full blast at the Thomas Metcalf School in Illinois and Bjorn is helping the teachers cope with the tech side of the pandemic situation at the Fair Heaven High in Vermont. The overall challenges in education are, of course, huge and sometimes the social part might be way more important than the formal curriculum.
Quite a few tech related tips whizzed by during our meeting and here are some quick web links:
https://nearpod.com/ – formative assessment made both effective and fun
https://zoom.us/ – one of the most talked-about video meeting platforms today; the local recording thingy supports separate audio tracks for each participant
https://discord.com/ – communities for gamers
https://anchor.fm/ – extremely easy podcast creation and publishing; you might not get the best support, stats or control (yup there is a bunch of negatives here) but you do get free service! Sometimes, of course, you get what you pay for.. A side note: Spotify paid USD 150 million for Anchor, if my memory serves me right. Congrats!
Towards the end of this episode we also got into discussing podcasting a bit; something that I find super interesting and rewarding. Both Zack and Bjorn are seasoned ‘indie podcasters’ so this part sure gave me additional food for thought. Podcasting – and especially the live stream & podcast combo – has definitely great potential in education.
You can find the audio-only podcast version (without my super cool and very visual green screen backdrop, unfortunately!) of our discussion here.
See you folks On Air!
DViS: Sverige för Ukraina #se4ua 