TOASTEDU

TOASTEDU is a podcast made at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and it addresses the faculty and staff who build the college's courses. Sam Fraulino, the college's instructional multimedia developer, hosts, and the show grows straight out of that role: helping colleagues make media that teaches well. Much of it is practical to the point of being a manual. Take the episode on the Rode Wireless Me, an affordable wireless microphone he calls one of his go-to products. He walks through intelligent gain assist, adjustable noise filters and use with an iPad, and he names the enemies of a clean recording: fan hum, barking dogs, garbage trucks rolling past. His argument is simple. Students who spend their days with earbuds in, scrolling TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, have little patience for muddy lecture audio, and clearer sound also makes captioning easier for students with hearing needs. The vertical-versus-horizontal episode starts from a question colleagues bring him before summer travel and settles on a working habit: shoot horizontally in 4K, then reframe for vertical clips in Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. GarageBand gets similar treatment, from background loops behind a class introduction to smoothing a spike in an instructor's three-minute recording instead of asking her to start over. He weighs it against Logic Pro, Adobe Audition and Audacity, and pushes back on the idea that a free tool must be a lesser one. Episode titles show how wide the subject range runs. Photography turns up in 'Ep28- Just Take the Pic!' and a JPEG-versus-RAW installment; podcasting craft in 'Ep15- Podcasting- Four Different Types of Podcasts' and 'Ep24-Podcast Episodes- How Long Should A Podcast Episode Be?'; gear in 'Ep22- Top Tech Gadgets for a Digital World' and 'Ep26- How Does an iPad Fit Into My Workflow?'. Social media is framed as a classroom asset rather than only a distraction. In the episode built around seven reasons, he argues for embedding selected YouTube videos in Canvas, letting students shoot group projects on their phones, and not writing off blogs and podcasts. Not everything is a tutorial. A Creativity thread pairs Sam with Dr. Caron Sada, and in one installment she turns the tables and interviews him about his own creative background. Their unscripted conversation on engagement covers why the CTLEE dropped its newsletter, how short YouTube videos now answer Canvas questions on demand, and how a new creative room is meant to make colleagues feel like learners again. Other guests bring campus specifics, including Lynn McClelland on the New Media Lab Experience and Elizabeth Stuff, an AFG representative, on Tuesday Tips for new adjunct faculty. That local grounding is the show's real character: Canvas, the CTLEE's Drop Zone, colleagues named one by one. Sam speaks plainly, admits when he is not sounding his best, and drops in personal asides such as backpacking through Italy with his daughter. His closings repeatedly include an open offer to email him or sit down in person for help.