Teach Me the Web

November 09, 2009

As a teacher of Web Design and Development at the high school level, I have been bringing in guest speakers for about 3 years now.  It wasn’t until last year that I decided to base my curriculum around bringing in a speaker every Friday.  If I can’t bring my students to the web design conferences, I’m going to bring the professionals to them.  After all, it is these young people that need to hear what you have to say about this field.

I know there’s many students, teachers, classrooms, and adults that could also benefit from hearing these presentations as well.  For this reason from day one, I knew I should be recording these so I invested in a high quality digital recorder.  It worked well, and I always meant to start a podcast with them but I never did.  In lou of that, I wrote a brief reflection on the guest speaker and offered the audio for download.  But I wanted more.

There was a guest speaker who came in one day when I was out, our process was so automated that it really wasn’t an issue, students set up and recorded the presentation.  I listened to the audio to catch up and felt like I was in a black box listening to something fun and exciting just around the corner.  Despite being helpful I felt it really lacked the personality that actually being here gave.  In addition, at Damascus HS we have an awesome video productions department.  I talked to them and we worked out a system: on Friday they drop off a high end digital camera, I hit record, after our speaker they come by and pick it up, and about a week later they deliver a chopped version of the presentation.

With all of this in mind, I decided that since I didn’t have to worry about optimizing and chopping up the video (thanks Alex Sauter and Mr. Swiger) that I would spend that extra time developing a video podcast.  With most of the kinks worked out I am happy to share the fruits of our labor.  I will continue to update these throughout the year so subscribe via iTunes.

The Launch

I am happy to officially announce the launch of the Teach me the Web Guest Lecture Podcast.  You may also notice the link in the top right of the main navigation has changed to podcast.  In addition, the blog archive page (accessible via the blog link in the main navigation) has changed to include and specify articles, interview, and podcasts.

Why a podcast?

It is really pretty amazing how many people (adults especially) have mentioned to me that they wish they could be in my class.  I think I’m a pretty good teacher but I could count on one hand how many people said that before I developed this guest speaker program.  I realize it has value and I want people to learn and grow from it.  Plus I think it’s a great resource for young people to build skills through.  In addition to simply teaching web design, I work to enhance and update web education.  It is an educational arena that really hasn’t caught up to the current industry standards yet.  I’m hoping that this podcast series will help other educators in all venues who teach web design and development.  A video podcast is portable, accessible, and convenient.  I’m hoping you can make use of it.