I've been creating podcasts for just under two years now. 
I do the Ed Tech show "Check This Out" with my friend and podcast partner Brian Briggs. More recently I started a show called "Talking Social Studies", where a panel of Social Studies teachers share out ideas and resources. 
Along with making podcasts, I have been listening to shows since 2005 and have done a fair amount of podcasting workshops and trainings. 
It is these trainings where I often get the question, "can you tell me just how to get started with podcasts"? I follow up with questions back such as whether they want to listen or create and then try to help guide them. 
It is these questions that prompted me to start making easy to follow flowcharts / infographics for educators who looking into jumping into the podcast world. These are intended to reduce the barrier of entry for anyone, even slightly interested. 
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Here is my first of these. Please be kind.... it is my first major one of these creations I've really tried!
Although you can view the image below, you can download the full resolution version here if you would like this to be printed.

Special thanks to my friends Briggs and Roland Aichele who helped with ideas and edits while working on this graphic. 

Feel free to share with others as well. I will have a follow up to this for those interested in starting their own podcast in the near future.

I recently was able to attend the Lead 3.0 conference in Redondo Beach CA which is a symposium of Educational Leadership for the 21st century.

Now for me in my relatively new role outside the classroom as a TOSA, it was quite the experience to be part of a group admins and leaders. I was able to catch up with several Ed Tech friends, have a little Jedi Juice (aka some Silver Bullets) and do a little all-around networking. In the session I attended I walked away with some great insight and ideas.

Amy Fadeji gave a live virtual tour by interviewing admins from throughout the country in Google Hangouts. We saw Bill Selak’s discuss drones at his school, Jen Kloczko have her kids show their school spirit in dance and principal Brad Gustafson’s demonstration of the transformation of learning spaces in Minnesota. You can see his tour here: 

I also attended Jon Corippo & Eric Patnoudes session on developing a 1:1 plan for your district I got
some actually concrete plans and tools that I can take back. I found this very useful since my district of Rocklin Unified is looking into how this can work for us.

My two biggest highlights though were the two keynote speakers:Joe Sanfelippo and Sir Ken Robinson.

Did you know that between the two of them they have combined about 350k Twitter followers? 

​Ok, I'm going to attempt to finish my reflections from the CUE 16 Palm Springs Convention. This is not easy you see because, I've been stalling since there was just so much that happened. I'm actually trying to use the voice typing feature in Google Docs to help me so please forgive me if a little this is pretty disjointed. 

This was my second year attending this conference. This year I went down with a contingency  of Educators from my school district and for most of them it was their first time going to 2. I think by the time that we left their minds were filled to the brim with both ideas and inspiration. And I hope that as they return to their sites that they're able to have some of this magic rub off on the people they encounter.

The first wow factor that we experienced, as you can see in this photo, was our house that we rented. I guess it was a good thing that all the hotels were booked because we ended up having to rent a house and ended up with what we thought was like a mini resort. We're definitely going to go down this road again next year. 

My agenda for this conference was twofold; one, I had to present at several different sessions and the other was to really try to connect with so many of my head ed tech friends whom I've met and many whom I've never met in person. That I think is probably the greatest walk away that I had from this conference - the relationships. Of the two sessions that I presented one was early in the conference and the other was the last session before of the conference. My first session was on the LMS platform Schoology that I got to present with my friend and co-worker Bill Kimmel. We had a much larger than expected room and the session went fantastic! We had a fair amount of people who have never seen this program before and were pretty new to the whole idea about how an LMS can be a new way of looking at how teachers interact with their students and parents at home. We finished by playing a Kahoot game which got them excited inspired and even was able to give away 5 t-shirts courtesy of the folks at the Schoology booth thanks!