 Hey everybody, my name is Adam Jones. I live and work at the beautiful Proctorer Academy in central New Hampshire and I'm the founder of the Adam Jones Education podcast. And I wanted to take a little bit of time today to kind of go through and explain why I created this podcast, why it's relevant in my life, why it matters, if it matters at all. One of the ways that I've always seen myself is as a storyteller. Every member as a young kid telling stories around the campfire or with my friends, recounting things that had happened at another day and just, you know, bringing them up and telling them in vivid detail. Sometimes embellishing, so I'm sure. But I love telling stories and as I've gotten older, I've learned there's lots of ways to tell stories. You could tell stories obviously with a written word, with audio, with video, and you can still tell stories just verbally. But I've always seen myself as a storyteller, somebody that's taking ideas and learning from them and then adding to them and passing them along. Throughout my entire life I've always had mentors. Mentors has been a huge part of how I've learned, how I've gotten feedback, how I've bounced ideas around, and having a podcast is another way for me to connect with mentors, to ask them questions, to learn from them. And then the podcast is just an opportunity for me to record it and then share it with others. It felt like a really natural extension of all these conversations, all these conversations that I already have with people to actually take the time to acknowledge them and appreciate them and listen to their work and record it and really give it the time of day they deserve. So having a podcast and not knowing anything about it and just learning from scratch, it was so much a part of my process. It's not only does it mix the storytelling part of who I am and my desire to have mentors, but it also is this third piece which is the willingness to just try things I don't know anything about and just practicing and just trying and failing. So, you know, I didn't know anything about podcasting so I started looking on YouTube, I started asking other podcasters how they learned what they learned. And silly but surely I found, I don't know, a foothold around some of the concepts my wife bought me an incredible microphone around Christmas time last year and that was the final catalyst for me to say, all right, let's start recording. Let's step out and see if we can figure out how to do this and actually produce something of value to other people. So having a podcast is a natural outgrowth of this desire of mine to share and to connect and to learn. Thinking about creating a podcast is really critical to me that I was creating something that was going to be professional and something that people, if they were going to invest a half an hour or 45 minutes of their time, that it was well done and that the audio didn't spike or the conversation was interesting, that the story was well done. The other thing that's great about starting a podcast is it's a really low barrier to entry. It's easy to learn. There's not a lot of risk, you know, you can be in your pajamas. You can edit as much as you want until you actually publish and the capacity to create a high quality product is there. You have a good microphone, you know how to edit and you learn how to edit over time and you keep things simple, you can really produce an incredible show all from your computer which is incredible. That's like, that's something that's brand new. You couldn't do that 15 years ago. The other reason behind having a podcast is that it hits multiple goals for me. I can tell great stories, I can work with mentors, I can prove something of a high value but I'm also doing something that helps build my resume. It helps tell the story of me as an educator. That's the fourth thing and the fifth thing is that I work at Proctor and for Proctor Academy to point to my podcast and say, hey, this is what this EdTech guy here is doing, he's telling these stories, I think there's real value there. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about what I consider to be some of the best ways to learn. There's kind of essentially three components to really great, what I consider to be great learning, great independent learning. One is you need to have time to obsess over an idea. If you want to learn podcasts, you need the time to read about podcasts, to watch videos about podcasts. You just need time, uninterrupted time just to pour yourself essentially into the research and get fully exposed to it. So that's step one. The second component for a really valuable learning environment is the time to connect with experts. Making connections with people that know what you're doing better than you and learning from them, whether it is mentors or people you don't know or it's experts online or it's in books, but finding the time to connect with those individual people and ask them questions. So you spend time learning, say in step one, you get immersed and then from that comes a series of questions that are in context for your own learning and then you use those experts as a way to bounce ideas off of them to learn further in context for you. The third component to a really healthy individual learning environment is the opportunity to build something and to prototype and to try things out with the full knowledge that you're going to fail and I think that's critical. You have to be willing to make that leap based on your research, based on your asking questions, actually create a product and jump and leap so that you can fail. So it's when you create an environment all three of those things are possible. You have the time to obsess over an idea or something you want to make, the time to ask questions with people that know better than you and then an opportunity to build something and get feedback. When you have that loop, it's a really dynamic loop and I often think a lot about that loop and how I'm doing it in my own classes and maybe this isn't a side to just how the podcast was created and what I've learned from it, but how do we create learning environments where that is primary, where kids aren't following my curriculum as a teacher, they're following kind of their own interest, their own drive and we're giving them open, open-ended time to explore and wonder what about those interests they want to develop further and then how do we use Twitter and social media and other avenues, Facebook or even library data, how do we use those folks to connect our students with the outside world, you know the database in the library shouldn't just be books, it should be people, it should be our alumni and when that's available for students, when they're interested in you know, metal engineering and they can spend time researching and then go talk to a metal engineer and see their work and ask them questions and then the engineer says we'll now go practice it, I think that's just the best learning environment possible. So it wasn't like I set out to discover those, it wasn't like I set out intentionally with those three things in mind, it's just that was the natural learning process for me. So applying those three steps to the Adam Jones education podcast, the first step was time to obsess. So I, like I said before, I love podcasts, so I spent a lot of time learning what the genre of podcasting is like, you know, how people cut things, how stories are told, you know, there are different types of podcasts but really being exposed to multiple podcasts over multiple years where they got me curious and in love of the medium of the genre. And then as I said before, my wife gave me a microphone for Christmas and that was the catalyst for me to kind of take what I thought I knew about the podcasting genre and then leap and start recording and then I needed to figure out how to edit and I spent time with GarageBand just fully immersed in it, not knowing what I was doing, I watched some Lynda.com videos, I watched some videos on YouTube but I just poured myself into the different skills that were necessary. The other part of my research phase and obsession was reaching out to, well, I didn't reach out to Pat Flynn but Pat Flynn who's kind of a well-known smart income, passive income, podcaster guy, he's got an incredible program on YouTube, a six video playlist that really, I listened, I watched that multiple times and it really walked me through the steps to understand the full, like from the idea, from the beginning of an idea to the all the way down to publishing and that really gave me a sense of the scope of what it was like to do a podcast. The second step in my own learning process would be to have time to connect with experts and I really used Twitter for that. I reached out to other folks that run podcasts and I asked them questions about how much time does it take, how do you do your podcast, how much energy do you put into it, do you organize interviews way ahead of time, how much time do you spend editing them. I really reached out to those folks that were in the podcasting community that I really respected and thought their work was beautiful and I asked them about their work and I got great feedback whether it was through Twitter, talking on Twitter or it was through emails that I sent back and forth but it was just enough to kind of get my basic final context-based questions out of the way and answered so I could be have nothing between me and prototyping. Step three was just trying, just practicing and the first podcast today was with my wife, Kate, we were in the same place, it was easy to set up the microphone. I hadn't even thought about what questions I would ask, I remember I was sweating but we just we talked, we had a conversation and what I realized in that first interview was I just wanted the podcast just to be a conversation. It was good to have some questions for pair or some themes or some directions to go in but I didn't have to have it all written out and fully explained or fully diagrammed. I wanted the competition to have some flow to it. I wanted it to be organic and feel alive and I wanted to be able to go in different directions and I didn't really know that about my style as a podcaster until I just set out there and did it. Another example of prototyping is in my second or third podcast I interviewed one of my mentors and kind of people I look up to and her name is Star Sackstein, she works in New York and she does this really great work around standard-based grading and she and I talked a lot over Voxer and I asked her if she wanted to be one of the first guests on the podcast and so we had this amazing hour-long conversation where I thought all my devices were recording correctly and I was so excited it was going to be this awesome podcast and Star only has so much time and she spent a lot of time with me on the phone and then after I was done I realized that I had mistakenly recorded it like through an earpiece and the audio quality was terrible and I tried to turn up the gain you know in post-production but it just wasn't going to sound right and I knew that I wanted to have a high quality product and I wanted to do great work but I was like terrified to tell Star that I had messed it up but I got the courage and I called her and I said hey look you know this thing happened I really want to if we can have another conversation maybe we should wait a few days so we don't have to have the same conversation and she was awesome she was really great she's a teacher herself and she's like I understand and we actually the conversation we had the second time was better you have to be willing to leap you have to be willing to to try new things and be willing to fail and that's like the epitome of experiential learning is being willing to take a jump when you don't know if the ground is below you when I say jump I don't mean you just jump unintelligently you spend the time to obsess you you do your homework you do your research you connect with your experts you set yourself up for success and then you're willing to step out into the world and produce something and it might not be perfect the first time around you might make some mistakes like I did around you know not recording correctly or not really knowing what a conversation was what direction it was going to go or something but that's okay you just build it you create it and you publish it and you move on to the next thing and that is a learning process and it's an important process to be willing to take those risks and fail you identify somebody that you want to interview you reach out to them on social media you guys go back and forth maybe there's a follow-up set of questions they're curious about what you're going to be talking about maybe you set some early questions and some preliminary questions to them ahead of time set up a time to do the conversation you have a conversation you record it which is really exciting and then you're in this post-production place so if you have recorded for an hour you know it's going to take you an hour or two hours sometimes three hours to go through all that footage and edit the way you want it it doesn't have to take that long but certainly the beginning of the process it takes that long so you create it you edit it and then you publish it and that's not maybe you're halfway done at that point because there's still all the promotion to do you know you need to you need to get on facebook you need to get on twitter you need to connect with the person that you spoke to and put this audio it's already out in the world but how do you get people to listen to it i'm not super concerned about like how big the audience is i'm more concerned with just producing great content and that's one of the things that pat flinn i remember him saying was you know you just produce good work and those people that are interested in the work will find it and they'll listen and they'll learn from it and that's it like i'm not you know these are conversations with folks that i would have anyway and the fact that i'm able to record them and do something with them that and maybe that would bring value to somebody else's life that's great it's like the cherry on the top so i'm 15 episodes in and i got 10 episodes left to meet my goal for the year um and there shouldn't have any problem with that you know it's just a matter of finding the right amount of time to interview folks and then edit after the fact people some notable folks that i've had a chance to have conversations with in record the privilege to talk to um felix yakimino who's the founder of miami device i spoke to susan bearden who is the the founder of the twitch me app she's an incredible connector on twitter uh spoke to hans mondell who is a local colleague from new hampton who's taught me a lot star saksine as i mentioned before standard base grading i had the chance to spend time at uh ipad palooza in austin this summer and i did three episodes three days right in a row and then coming up uh and there's others you know you can go look at the podcast online coming up this november i'm going to be uh at miami device and i'm going to be kind of trying to tell the story of miami device in multiple podcasts some live some live radio and then some recorded and published stuff after the fact and i hope to have a few more episodes leading up to miami device with some of the keynote speakers my final message with podcasting is just try it you know there's nothing to lose it's it's a low risk low barrier to entry spend some time learning about it you know buy a nice microphone or not and just take a risk you know decide what kind of show you want to have if you wanted to be interview based like the show i have or if you want to if you have some knowledge or some expertise you want to just record yourself sharing with the world um i don't know just just take a leap and don't be afraid don't be afraid to fail in fact look to fail because that's the way that you learn having a podcast has certainly been an incredible catalyst for me to connect with other educators in the community to not only share their stories but for people i've had people approach me at conferences and say i'll listening to your podcast on you know standard based grading or relationship based pedagogy totally changed what we did in our district and that just blows me away because i just that was never my intention really i mean it's nice to hear that but it's great to connect with people at conferences but go a step further you know have a conversation with that person you know a month two months later and record it because you want to put it on your podcast or record it to share with your your circle of educators i mean obviously you have to let the person know you're recording and all that kind of stuff but i don't you know it's like we these conversations we have if they're valuable we should be sharing them so that we all can learn from one another and that's really the the central component here of this podcast is just a desire to tell stories to connect with mentors and to share those stories people find them useful and they inspire great if they don't that's fine too it's just it feels it feels right to produce a piece of art around people's stories and that's why i do what i do on the podcast i appreciate you taking the time to click on this video and watch it had somebody done a video like this when i was learning about podcasting it might have helped me know the path and it might have helped me know somewhere that i could have talked to so in that spirit if you're interested in podcasting or you're interested in anything around what i've talked about the educational model i explained all that stuff don't hesitate to reach out to me my twitter handle is adamjonesed um adamjonesed.com is my website just don't hesitate to reach out i'm all about connecting with people all about telling people's stories anything i can do to help the educational community which has given me so much i would love to do so thanks so much there's just people coming with their trucks can't do much have their trucks doing comes a truck i've seen you guys all like migrate it's not weird