Having a voice or being an influencer in today's realm of education means using your platform and expertise to advocate for positive change and inspire others to learn and grow. It means sharing your ideas, insights, and experiences with a wider audience, and engaging in meaningful dialogue and collaboration. It also means being open to feedback, criticism, and new perspectives, and constantly seeking improvement. Being an influencer in education is about passion and purpose.

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There are many ways to get your voice heard or influence others. Podcasts are one way. They are a popular and effective form of media that can be used for various purposes, such as education, entertainment, news, and storytelling. Choosing to record a podcast allows you to express your ideas and opinions in an engaging and personal way while reaching a wide and diverse audience. Podcasts are also relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, as they only require a microphone and recording software. Podcasts can also be edited and enhanced with music, sound effects, and other features to make them more appealing and professional. They are a versatile and creative tool that can provide valuable and enjoyable content for the listeners. This is why my collaborative group chose to create a podcast for our media project.

When my collaborative group decided on a podcast, we wanted to make sure that was engaging, informative, and unique. We also wanted to have a clear goal and vision for our podcast, we knew our target audience would most likely be educators. We thought a podcast would be an innovative way to discuss our digital learning publications. One of the problems that we encountered was that we all had very different topics. We decided to use a broad theme of educational technology and came up with a catchy title “EdTech Talks”. This title is a play on words of us being in the Masters of Education program that is geared towards Educational Technology. In the end, we found that we could blend our topics into innovative way that discussed teaching and learning practices in the 21st century. We were able to come up with an order that flowed well and complemented each other’s topic. We knew we needed to plan our episode ahead of time so we created an outline/script in a Word document that would guide our conversation and make sure we covered the main points. We planned an order that flowed well moving from topic to topic. We had a very deep discussion on these topics and eventually had to narrow it down so as not to lose the focus of our audience.

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We wanted to choose a format and structure that suited our podcast. We decided on a roundtable-type podcast design where we took turns discussing our topic and then introduced the next person. We used Zoom to record our podcast and edited the sound in Garage Band. We then used Canva to create our podcast presentation. We finished our editing in iMovie. At the end of our podcast, we had a discussion on how we can all use these practices to become better educators and how this program has pushed us out of our comfort which is where true learning takes place. This was a great learning experience where I was able to collaborate with my wonderful group of peers to create something that can be presented to help fellow educators. 

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Below is our finished Podcast: "Ed Tech Talks", a space where good friends on a learning journey through a master’s program come together to collaboratively share thoughts, ideas, and reflections on educational technology. In section 5, I discuss integrating ePortfolios into digital learning classrooms which correlates to my innovation plan over ePortfolios. I hope you enjoy it!

 

If you would like to learn more about the power of ePortfolios, here are a few resources:

ePortfolios Explained

Edutopia (search ePortfolios)

Balancing the 2 Faces of ePortfolios

What is an ePortfolio

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