I’ve just started an afterschool club at a local school to do Podcasting. The teacher who invited me in billed it as “Audio Engineering” but I hope podcasting will be the basis of the club. Thats not just because I’m NOT a sound engineer! (I’ve picked that up like everyone else in podcasting.) What I am trying to do is to get kids to be creative and produce their own shows. Recording and editing is the easy part. What is much more difficult is to come up with something that people want to hear.
How do you teach that?
There are many stages before I can get to the stage where kids are independently producing their own shows. Firstly they need to be inspired by the medium. They need to find shows that move them. In addition they need to realise that they have already have the tools to produce ‘radio’ sitting on their desks.
The whole Podcast world is full of delight at the fact that the means of production are now in the hands of anyone who has the balls to get out and do it. I’m just hoping that I can inspire someone to get out there and start doing it. Or is this the wrong way to think about it? Perhaps these kids are what can inspire me to produce a compelling show? At least in the begining.
So this week I’m actually going to do a Podcast and include them in it.
see BradFM.com
PS. We’ve done two sessions so far. I’ve got 4 or 5 guys 14 year old who are interested. First I introduced the tools, I chose Audacity because its freeware so the students can download it at home and there are enough sound engineering effects for producing jingles. The intro spilled on into the second session. Then we analysed some jingles to start being able to recognise the different elements.
Posted by richard 
