Creating familiarity
Profiles in Success: Kids Congress

Kids Congress Sharing ideas and concepts Totally relevant to kids today The essence of podcasting Creating familiarity Objectives Improved communications across schools Sharing ideas and concepts regardless of distance Awareness and acceptance of wider audiences Results Skills and confidence gained in using technology to communicate Parents enthused about children applying themselves to research and development of podcasts Community and familiarity between students and staff, regardless of location Potential to use podcasting to improve quality and timeliness of teacher personal development

One of the highly welcomed benefits arising from the use of podcasts for the Kids Congress has been an enormous sense of community and familiarity. While the constant e-mails between students at the various schools established a definite communication link, it was the podcasts that added an extra level to the virtual introductions made between students and staff.

Meldrum explains: "By the time we arrived at the two-day Kids Congress camp, everyone had spent time viewing and listening to the various podcasts. Most of the students – and even a number of parents – were walking up to people they had never met in person before, knowing full well who they were simply by having seen the photo and video podcasts."

And the teachers

According to Meldrum, podcasting within the Broken Bay Diocese education environment is destined for use well beyond just the students. As tools for teacher personal development (PD), iPods and podcasting have the potential to improve the quality and timeliness of PD along with dramatically reducing delivery costs. Meldrum explains: "The cost of releasing a single teacher for one day's PD is approximately $350 – around the same price as one of the latest iPods.

"Issuing each teacher with an iPod, then delivering PD material as a podcast on an as-needed basis gives us a massive saving over the course of year," Meldrum says. "The real advantage, though, is that we can deliver PD material to all teachers almost immediately. There's less need to pull them away from their classes for full-day training sessions, simply because with PD podcasting, we're delivering just in time information."

"What people need to realise is that podcasting is an entirely new medium that has the power to impact on communication just as the introduction of the printing press did!"

— Paul Meldrum, Senior Education Officer