Video Podcast

Creating Moments of the Month

As a 4^th grade teacher, one of my greatest challenges is communicating consistently with the parents of my students. This issue was the inspiration for my podcast, Moments of the Month. Producing a short podcast each month and sharing it with parents would be a great way to showcase what we are doing as a class as well as shine a spotlight on a few individual students.

I used Camtasia, Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe Premiere Pro CC to create and assemble the assets for this project. I began my project by creating my title slide on a red polka dot image, found through Flickr. I sized it and added title text in Photoshop. Next, I found the Constitution, light red stars and question mark images through Pixabay. I used Photoshop to resize and lay text over the light red stars. All of my images are free for commercial use with no attribution required through Creative Commons.

I decided to create the main sections of my podcast as separate files in Camtasia. I created a file for each of the following sections: introduction and Constitution, star of the week, make math happen and closing. I used the font, hipster, in my title slide and on the Star of the Week slide, and the font, hello teacher, throughout the rest of my project. I wanted the project to have an elementary education feel with a little sophistication. Also, throughout the project, I used the color dropper tool to match fonts, ribbons and background shapes to my main images.

The Introduction Segment

I imported all of my images into Camtasia’s media bin and selected my title slide. Then, I recorded my welcoming narration as tract 2 and layered an audio track (summer whistling, from Camtasia) on top of that. Because the jingle track was so loud, I decreased it to play less than 20%. Additionally, I faded the music track in and out. Next, I placed my Constitution image, adding an animation to make it appear to zoom and turn at the same time. I then inserted the question mark image and made some text explode into and off of the image. Finally, I placed corresponding narration over these images.

The Star of the Week Segment

Making the star of the week portion of my podcast was fun! I played around with the different icons and shapes, including a different icon to represent one fun fact about each student mentioned in the segment. Each icon also had a different behavior as it entered and exited the frame. Finally, I had a star drop into the frame, followed by the name of each student. I kept the behaviors of the star and names consistent, to place more emphasis on the narration and the icons.

The Make Math Happen Segment

The section called Make Math Happen turned out a little longer than I intended. However, I did want to briefly review the concept of angles before offering up the challenge to find different types of angles. The first step was creating the screencast. I used Camtasia to capture my screen while it was connected to my SMART board. Using this tool, moving the rays with my finger was much easier and allowed me to write short reminder notes, just like my students are used to seeing in class. I trimmed some of this screen capture and edited out a little from the middle. Toward the end of the segment, I added a second screen cast, showing where to find the discussion board. I added an arrow with some text to highlight the placement of the discussion. I also made the shape move in with an animation and zoomed the page behind it.

At the beginning and end of this segment, I used a background intro slide called “red triangles”. I placed text on top and made the text pop a little with an animation. Since there was already so much going on visually, I decided to simply fade in and out at the beginning and end and crossfade between each slide.

The Wrap-up

At the end of my podcast, I thought pairing the title slide with the summer whistling tune used in the introduction was a nice way to maintain consistency. Again, I added narration, adjusting the volume of the music and fading it in and out. I also added an outro, matching the ribbon color to the title slide and changing the font to match the other slides. As I am currently using the 30 day free trial of Camtasia, there is a watermark on all of my segments created with that software.

In Premiere Pro CC, I was able to put everything together and add my personal logo at the beginning of the project. Fading in from and out to black were my transition choices. I did have one issue with sequence settings in this project and had to make a change in this area for the Make Math Happen segment. Although it took a while, I figured out how to get all of my assets to match in sequence setting and still look good.

I exported my project and tried to add it to Podomatic, but ran into trouble with my video portion not being compatible with my free membership. As a result, I decided to go with Youtube. Since it is fairly easy to do so, I went ahead and added the closed captioning, making a few edits to the original script (mainly Griffin to Giffin and adding punctuation). The final product is what you see embedded on this page. I hope you enjoy Moments of the Month!