Radio201

So much goes on in a school, we sometimes take these things for granted. In my class, there's a constant flurry of activity after school in robotics and eSports, besides tutoring, and students popping in to do homework, quizzes, and edit eBooks. And outside these walls, too! So in this episode I wanted to put together a collection of recordings I made, that capture the force field I encounter every day when I open these doors, and carry with me when I leave. Including a snapshot of an amazing speaker I recorded one morning at one of our morning assemblies.

In this episode, my last podcast for the school year, I invite you to listen to the best student podcasts out of my computer lab. You'll be amazed at the topics and the discussion that ensues. Listen to Xander, Braxton and Anthony discuss social media (they called it "What's wrong with this generation?"), Josh and his 9th grade brother Adam discuss coding ("Coding Games"). Gavin interviews 9th grader Andrew about the airforce program known as 'CAP' ("A Cadet's guide to CAP"). Ava and Georgia discuss orchestra ("Symphony Wars") weighing in on leadership issues. Gia and Magnolia discuss historical fiction that they have published as their eBook project in my class ("Book Talk"). Emmit was so taken up with history he interviews his favorite teacher, Mr. Greer. These were just a smattering of the 15 podcasts recorded last week!

We grownups tend to say that kids say the darndest things. It gets better when we put a mic in front of them! Enjoy!

Being a teacher, I’ve heard it said all too often —  “Schools don’t teach these anymore!” Or that what’s being taught in schools is outdated.

In this podcast you'll hear Dave Conelias talk about what school can and should do. Dave, founder of MilestoneC, an organization that helps bridge that gap between the supply (schools) and demand (industry) speaks his mind about the good, the bad, and the overhyped in tech.

I asked him to weigh in on AI and other emerging tech since I interviewed him a few days after Google announced it would release its own AI, known as Bard, in an apparent mad rush to compete with all the ChatGPT hype. I wanted to know what aspect of this ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer’ (the GPT part of the ChatGPT) was showing up on his radar. His analogies are fabulous.

It was so good I took out my interjections in the interview (by the way, this podcast goes through some heavy duty editing to tighten things up), so as to keep it to just around 11 minutes. If you're a student, this will give you some useful context. If you're a parent or a not-tech person, I hope this addresses some of the questions you probably have. Enjoy!

In my 40th podcast, I wanted to try out a new way to record it with a remote guest: Podcastle. It's a web-based platform that records multiple voices - a bit like Zoom. My guest, was Don Wilde, a software engineer and entrepreneur who once worked at Intel. Don helped me with my Robotics team many years ago. His insights into software and technology through the years has been truly inspiring.

In this podcast, we talk about the inherent bias in software that doesn't happen by accident. The discussion is particularly important to us as we unpack that can of worms we call AI, and the data sets that are being used to train the software. Machines do learn from machines, but the 'data' (images, words, values etc) we feed into these machines will influence what we get out of them. The old adage, 'garbage in, garbage out' has become relevant again. Bias in, Bias out, so to speak.

Another live podcast! This time with three members of the cast of Beauty and the Beast. Josh Williams, Preston Hilton and Cammie Roberts. This follows the highly acclaimed High School musical in February with a cast of hundreds, fabulous sets, stunning vocals and a our amazing orchestra. 

It's about two months since AI apps sprayed their pixie dust all across the Internet. The impact of AI on education --and all content -- is a reality we must face. So I wanted to check things out and run these apps through some testing. I wanted to check my own biases, too, and get to know what it content will look like. I put ChatGPT through several tests, and also the design app, Dall.E. 

In this podcast I explain how these panned out, and how we teachers are approaching this new wave. For now at least I have come to the conclusion that Content creators of the world — authors, journalists, copywriters, podcasters — shouldn’t feel threatened. But as one expert I heard explain, while we are peering into the machine's 'intelligence' --while we are testing these out -  we are actually being lured into being the beta testers of the machines!

What could Steve Jobs, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and Voting have in common? You'd be surprised!

My guest on this show is Steve Niemeyer, a math teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School. He recently conducted an impromptu 'experiment' at our morning assembly that he hosted. Mr. Niemeyer demonstrated how a very small percentage of people end up making decisions on behalf of the majority, especially if the majority is apathetic, doesn't voice their opinion, or exercise their civic right. The larger point was to inspire young people to expand their circle of influence. 

There's a wonderful anecdote about how Steve Jobs used to do this with his employees - a story I learned this from a guest speaker in my class who had worked at Apple. 

As for that law of thermodynamics, you've got to listen how only a math teacher could put it in context! 

In a classical school, fine arts is often seen as the icing on the cake, especially here at Benjamin Franklin High School. Our music program attracts thousands of people, especially this year, with our a new Franklin Center For The Performance Arts. 

This podcast looks at how the music and theater program come together as a 'fine art.' Specifically, I dropped in on one of Mrs. Haylee Otero's classes as she put together the annual choir concert. It was just a few weeks after the musical, Bye Bye Birdie, with a cast of more than seventy-five. You'll hear how teaching takes place on stage, which is obviously a very different environment from a classroom. (When the sage is literally off the stage!)

I also asked her about how she manages the logistics of a production: From choreography and props, to lighting, and sound ..the period costumes, and making sure the wireless mics come through! She has talented, passionate colleagues, the Boosters, and of course dedicated students. "It's a very, organic, creative process," says Otero. "At a certain point you hand it off to the students, and it no longer becomes my material." Hopefully, you get to peek under the hood of 'musical theater' at its best. 

Enjoy!

Students file into a classroom. Outside, taped to the teacher's door are handmade posters praising the 'Chairman.' Others condemn the ‘dictator.’  Welcome to a history class - a simulation -- under the strict rule of Chairman Greer. Robert Greer is teaching a unit on totalitarianism in an unconventional way. He has got his 7th grade students to participate in the simulation in which there are spies, a Clothing Officer, and a Propaganda Officer. Students can earn and lose points for their participation. The Chairman is, by design, unpredictable. Sso everyone has to be on their guard - including party members. 

It's a fun class, if you consider simulation fun. I was a fly on the wall --um, a sort of a spy with a recorder observing how it went over two days. Now you have an inside view too! 

Students in Writing and Publishing class comment on a writer, as she fled from Ukraine. 

If you look around you, many features of new technology borrow --or steal - from old technologies. Email is a classic example. It's icons and methods are leftovers from this. The envelope, and the paperclip for example. In other apps, the Floppy disc is the standard icon when it comes to saving something. In my class on Writing and Publishing, we still use notebooks, pen and paper, even though the class is computer lab.

In this podcast, my guest Evo Terra, a veteran podcaster, talks about how important it is to "grab a pen and paper" before you grab the microphone. Also, how meticulous he is about editing the content. Evo is quite a legend. A Phoenix-based writer and a podcaster, he literally wrote the book on podcasting. Podcasting for Dummies - one of the first editions. His advice to us as writers, bloggers and podcasters could be taken by anyone planning to move between platforms. "I don't re-record my audio," he says, "because I've because I spend so much time on the outline." 

Maybe you might be someone who doesn't need to write things down on the back of an envelope. If you're one of those people, I'd love to hear your story. You might be a guest on this show!

Cybersecurity, to simplify it a bit, is all about the good guys (or white hats) going after the bad guys. Actually, the industry calls them Bad Actors. Actors? For guys who could bring down airplanes, or cripple a city’s power grid, that's an odd label.

But it’s a real thing. If you’ve heard of cyber intruders hacking, say, a webcam in a child’s bedroom, or the term Zoombombing (where someone could crash a Zoom conference call, or take control of the microphone) then you would be thankful that there is such a field as cybersecurity. People who look out for these ‘bad actors’ 247. It’s quickly become a college level class.

So for this reason and more –because we talk about safe digital practices in my class – I invited Spencer Luke, a cybersecurity expert, to talk to my students. I like how he demystifies techspeak, and avoids the jargon. Enjoy the show!

Don Meyer is a man of many parts. In his youth he grabbed his a guitar and lugged along his Bridgestone mountain bike to spend time in Europe. His plan? To spend a year in Italy.  Working on his Master’s degree he felt the tug of renaissance literature —  John Webster and Shakespeare in particular. “I just wondered,” he says, “why Italy in particular, held such sway in renaissance literature.” He had noticed that so many playwrights in England used Italian plots, characters, and settings and it piqued his curiosity even more. He just had to immerse himself in this! His passion for the romance languages let him dig deeper into literature and connect the dots between cultures and language.

And so fast forward to 2021, with 29  years of teaching under his belt, Don Meyer's literature class, whether it is focused on Dante’s Inferno or Macbeth, draws on this his ‘teacher training’ — much of it on wheels, so to speak. I stumbled into this conversation over a cup of coffee. With an espresso maker at his desk, he is quite the barista!

In this podcast I talk to him about all this and, just like a bike ride that allows for a random detour down a road not found on Google maps, we make a foray into C.S. Lewis and his ‘prophetic’ insights into life today with so many friction points in democracy and social media. Don’s analysis of Lewis’s work from The Screwtape Letters to his science fiction novels like Out of the Silent Planet is priceless.

As a teacher, and as a writer, I have come to realize that the act of podcasting is much more than an ‘interview’ or a conversation. It gives me access to deeper, richer, and even random insights I couldn’t get from a TED Talk or any other social media channel. The mic is just another piece of hardware. But it has an uncanny way of allowing ideas to bubble up.

When you hear the word cloud, what immediately comes to mind? Perhaps iCloud, if you’re an Apple user. Or Cumulus clouds, perhaps? But there's a different kind of cloud - one that doesn’t even exist - the Oort Cloud - and a story of how exciting science can be.

Stephanie Quick’s class is an elective. At 6:30 in the morning! This period is known as a ‘zero-hour’ for a reason. When I walked in, the air was thick with magnetic fields, and planetary bodies. Soon students were discussing black holes and Red Giants as casually as if they were discussing the pros and cons of Chick Fil-A. I tried remaining the fly on the wall, but the enthusiasm was too contagious to keep me on that wall. I found myself raising my hand to ask questions. I was that kid in the corner waiting to be called on! This podcast addresses the broader question of what STEM and science does for young people. Enjoy!

For my Technology Speaker series at Benjamin Franklin High School, I kicked off the semester with a speaker from Google. Patrick Krecker. It was timely as I had just completed teaching units on the roots in the Net. How none of what we access on the Web (or Google) would be possible if not for a man named Tim Berners-Lee.

Patrick has a gift for explaining complex ideas with metaphors. He talked about security holes, and the ongoing pursuit hackers and the role of ‘white hats.’ I was glad he personalized what coding in his job involves (He says has written about 200,000 lines of code) given that coding is making its way into many schools now, to get students better prepared for what lies ahead.

As for me, I learned new terms and concepts, too. Things like ‘double spend,’ ‘deprecated software‘ and something known as ‘cross-site scripting‘ which refers to the injection of malicious scripts or code into ‘trusted’ websites.

Robert Lasco is a science teacher with an eclectic background - he has visited more than a hundred countries, jumped out of an airplane, and served the country. He has the demeanor of a Dickensian character, but the mind of a scientist. Oh, and he happens to know cryptography! In this podcast I pick his brains on why science matters, and how it fits into classical education. 

I recorded this episode during the summer break, on a topic close to my heart. Well, a topic on which I occasionally weigh in. We teachers tend to reward clarity; the red marker is brought out when we spot clichés and redundancies. But here's the thing. We - yes we grown-ups - are often tempted to toss in jargon into everyday speech. Even I catch myself in jargonizing mode. 

So in this episode I wanted to talk about the current crop of jargon that has been finding its way into our conversations. And yes, you can bet your bottom cryptocurrency I will use some these examples in my class this year. 

Being forced off the grid can be inspiring. 'Digital Natives' assume the Internet will be there when they walk into class. Especially my class, a computer lab. One morning, the Internet was dead. No big deal, I told them. There are parts of the world, and even swaths of this country where Wi-Fi is not a given. Networks are sluggish or non-existent.

Without computers - since we use Chrome boxes-- it's an opportunity to improvise rather than panic. At such times I turn to the next best thing, a Socratic discussion. So I raised this topic: “What would you do if the Internet suddenly disappeared from our lives?”

Listen to how the class went. 

"We are not in the business of teaching what to think, but how to think." In this podcast about Classical education, I talk to Jason Klicker a teacher of AP History, on topics ranging from the Federalist Papers to Socratic seminars, and a controversial experiment on 'obedience' in the nineteen sixties you may not have heard about. It was an experiment involving electric shocks. Jason's take will certainly jolt you. Pun intended

She covered the White House, and Congress in 2017, and gives us the backstory of being in the media, of writing stories and understanding audiences.

In this podcast I interview Theresa Smith to unpack what it takes to be be in writing and publishing in the digital age. It's competitive. It's frenetic. But most of all it's all about being honest, and accurate, and getting it right!

Ancestral research has become simplified to a large extent because of access to databases around the world. Even if there is no database on one's family line, the Internet has made it possible to connect the dots. In this episode, I talk to a researcher who's been digging up court records, baptismal certificates and patents that leave a paper trail to the Mayflower. Yes that ship that is part of this country's history. 

Steve DesGeorges traces his family line to a person on his mother's side who was pivotal in make that journey possible - a man named Edward Cushman. In this podcast I talk to him about his research and where it has taken him. Research and data gathering is not always dry and academic. In the end data helps us construct a bigger picture, or at least a clearer picture. Research should help us uncover the 'story' --the story within the story-- that gets buried over time. Research can moreover be the filter through which we process the present. In this case, the story of immigration, and what it means to be in a new country. 

The story is close to me for another reason. I've been digging up my ancestral records from another part of the world, since my ancestors also came on barely seaworthy craft to Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then known as. 

Student debt is a toxic topic. Banks and financial institutions exploit young people’s ignorance of a byzantine tax code and interest rates. So what better way than to address the deb trap,and what better place than in school - along math, science and music?

In this podcast, I interviewed my colleague, Jessica Keaster who’s been teaching this subject for more than a decade. Her Junior High students become my students in the subsequent semester. It’s a solid foundation to build on when I discuss, say, SEO or digital citizenship — or those perennial hot topics such as privacy, and even the economics of cybersecurity.

In schools today, as the distinction between digital and non-digital blurs, a day set apart for all tings digital is passé.

Radio Lab is a podcast about Writing and Publishing, Computers and Technology at Benjamin Franklin High School. This is your host Angelo Fernando. I began this podcast in the middle of the COVOD-19 pandemic, when schools were hovering between lockdown and hybrid classes.

The pandemic has made us hyper-aware of all things tech, and I will be covering anything from privacy, screen-time, video-conferencing fatigue, Google Classroom, cameras, digital citizenship, and everything in-between.

It was a huge experiment for many of us teachers - shifting between real school to online, to a 'hybrid' model, and then to in-person classes with some students opting to be online only.

In this podcast I talk with my colleague and comrade-in-arms, Dave Mullis, who leads the teacher tech support group here at Benjamin Franklin High School.