Educator podcasts are an effective and timely way to provide professional development and allow educators to share their stories. Through collaboration between three Utah educator podcasts, we have created an educator podcast network that helps provide opportunities and professional development to educators from Utah and beyond.

I am a big fan of grants. They help teachers find the money to support their professional development and curricular needs. Whether you are looking at a grant for materials or to travel the world, there is a grant to help you fund your idea. However, I have found that many educators are unaware or under-aware of the grants available to them as educators. So, in order to help with awareness in Utah, I created this Wakelet collection that I add to a few times a year. It has national and local material and travel grants to apply for throughout the year. As a recipient of many grants, I would encourage any educator to find a grant that meets their needs and apply.

About a year ago Adobe announced Project Shasta, an online podcasting tool for revising and editing podcasts. I joined immediately. I loved the simplicity and getting a transcript as I spoke, but I just didn’t want to add something that was in beta to my podcasting workflow. A few weeks back, Project Shasta was rebranded as Adobe Podcasts and is working towards being a full part of the Creative Cloud.

Maybe it is my nostalgia for the 90s or my years of overpaying for bits of plastic with music on them, but there is something to holding a physical media object in your hands. CDs, DVDs, and A-Tracks all feel different than the several thousand songs I have on my iPhone. A CD has artwork that people put work into, it has a lyric sheet, and sometimes, as noted by many a punk kid, other bands to check out and/or a reading list of all the amazing books and zines that informed the music.