Simple, inexpensive technologies can change how we fundamentally approach problems. One school district in the United States is doing this to streamline the process of recording applicant interviews...and it turned out to be a great to get administrators podcasting.

...when our Director of H.R. asked me if I had any ideas about how we could streamline the process of recording applicant interviews, I thought it was a great opportunity to get the rest of the administrators podcasting. So we bought a bunch of 30GB iPods with Griffin iTalk microphones for the principals and district administrators. We use a very structured interview process which ensures that the administrators can trust one another’s evaluations. That means that one elementary principal can interview a candidate and put that person’s interview recording into a pool that all the other elementary schools can draw from. The whole process goes like this:

1. Record (it’s a one-click operation with the iTalk)
2. Connect the iPod to the computer and transfer the WAV file
3. Compress the interview to MP3 format
4. Upload the file to a special area of one of our servers
5. Subscribe to a podcast feed that delivers all of the interviews for a given licensure area

No more sending cassette tapes around the district. Everything is password protected to ensure that only authorized people can upload or subscribe to interview podcast feeds.

How could you--in whatever way you serve SAISD--think different about the work you do and use technology to "streamline" the process you go about every day?