Podcasting for Dummies

That would be me--the dummy, I mean.

Probably the biggest challenge I will have with podcasting is getting over the angst that it has caused me just getting this one done for the assignment.

I have to tell myself that it is something I have never done, that I used a program I have never seen before, and that it has got to get easier from here.

I had to use my noggin quite a bit this time which is funny, because the subject matter of my podcast was thinking and how students don't do enough of it. Here is my link to that:
Knowing versus Thinking

Anyway, I had often thought about using podcasts in my classroom because I heard of other teachers doing so. Since I wanted to have all the coolest stuff, I figured I better look into it. Having the coolest stuff makes it seem like I know what I am doing!

Seriously, though, I don't really think I am going to jump into regular podcasting anytime soon for one major reason: nobody will listen to them. I'm serious. I have worked with 8th graders long enough to know that there is not the slightest chance that there will be even a smidge of interest in anything I podcast.

For example, we have a vocabulary program that we have been doing and there is an online component that includes podcasts of the words and their definitions. No matter what kind of build-up I give to the idea of putting their vocab words on their MP3 players, nobody has ever done it. Not one student. That means zero.

I have what I think is a practical theory: if a teacher falls down in the forest making a podcast and there is no one there to hear it, does it make any noise?

But now I am being silly. What if I DID do a podcast? What would I do?

I think the best thing for me to do would be record all of my lectures everyday. I think it would be great to have it all right there on my website for the student who is absent or the one who needs to review what I said. I may actually do such a thing if I had a wireless headset mic.

This would meet a couple of the NETS-S standards:

#3 Research and Information Fluency, because they would "locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media."

#4 Technology Operations and Concepts because they would become familiar with the use of something in the field of technology that is new to them.

All in all, I think podcasts can be a great addition to a teacher's repertoire, just not an 8th grade teacher.

New Literacies for the 21st Century

Do educators play a vital role in ensuring students are prepared to be productive in the 21^st Century? I have two answers to that, yes, and maybe.

Without a doubt educators should be leading the charge—as they always have—in making sure that today’s students are prepared to meet the demands of a 21^st Century workforce. The very act of teaching is one that seeks to prepare people for a productive future, whether it was a future that did not yet contain much technology or one that is busting out with new gizmos every day.  Strangely, though, the way I think that charge needs to lead is not necessarily technology driven.

The first skill students need is the skill of thinking. Maybe I am a bit jaded as a teacher of twelve and thirteen-year-olds, but I am constantly noticing that the skill they lack more than any other is the skill of bearing down and working through problems. That problem might be reading, studying, or writing, but it can’t be solved instantly, and at that age it seems like if it isn’t instant, students can’t be bothered. So for that reason, any conversation I have about what students need to succeed, has to start with them engaging their minds and working things out in their brains.

But let’s assume that they have the tenacity to bear down and learn. Certainly, they also need to have strong reading and writing skills in order to excel with technology of any kind—especially now that our  technology is so participatory. It is a challenge to make sure students are developing the communication skills because as the capabilities of technology are exploding, it seems the ability to take advantage of those technologies is eroding.

As was discussed in our text, you just can’t take advantage of the read/write revolution of Web 2.0 technologies without the proper skills. Nowadays, it seems that technology is dragging down people’s writing skills. Take text messaging. The anti-grammar, anti-spelling platform of SMS messaging isn’t good for standardized communication on the internet. As teachers, we need to be able to encourage them with the new writing that they are exploding with—seeming they write more now than ever—while guiding them so that they know how to use it properly when the venue demands it.

If we can succeed in students getting the thinking and communication skills they need to take advantage of technology advances, we still face challenges as educators in making sure they are up to speed. My “maybe” on whether teachers play a vital role is predicated on the fact that money might be an even bigger factor.

Anybody notice that schools don’t have any money anymore?

Here we are with a ton of cool tools to aid learning, but our economy is not cooperating. Not only are the schools probably going to start falling further behind as budgets are squeezed, but more and more families are likely to find themselves off the internet as other bills take priority in some households. I think we are probably at a point right now where the percentage of our students with access at home to technology has probably leveled off and may very well decrease in these tough economic times.

So teachers do play a big role in making sure we take advantage of the incredible technologies of Web 2.0, but we might soon see our influence blunted by the economic slowdown. I know that I will be incorporating some things into my curriculum, but I am not sure that they will take off

My Favorite 2.0 Tools

Who knew there were so many tools out there we could use?


I thought I knew a bit about the internet (I spend enough time on it), but I truly learned a ton of new things about the tools available and the surprising ways they can be used in the classroom. 


Honestly though, at this time I am only extra excited about one: the wiki. Not just any wiki, but a new type that I think in many ways may revolutionize the way people communicate and collaborate. 


Google Wave is that tool and I am excited to learn more about it, use it, see it go into wide release, and use it in my classes by next fall. It is not really billed as a wiki, but unless I misunderstood our unit on wikis, it is at least wiki-like. 


Not just wiki-like, but wiki-plus, I think. It has all the collaborative features of a wiki--multiple people editing the same document--and many more. 


As an educator, I just want to mention one that I just learned about: with Google Wave, you can go back in time and play back what has been added and edited to the document. I never understood how big a deal that was until today. 


Check this out. As a teacher, I imagine one thing that might be difficult about assessing participants contributions on a wiki is, well, keeping track of who has participated. With this playback feature, you can see, edit-by-edit, who worked on the document! 


This is just the latest reason I am excited about one day (it is still in beta) using Google Wave with my students. 

Flick Flick Hooray!

I love Flickr and I have learned so much about photography because of it. Now I can start considering the possibilities for using it with my classroom.

I signed up for Flickr about a year ago and, after Facebook, it is easily my most commonly visited site.

The most pleasant discovery for me on Flickr was the groups. I had known that it was a place to store your pictures and share them with others, but I didn't know about the groups and, most importantly, the disscussion topics within groups.

They have groups for every photography-related thing you can think of there. I have found some of the most wonderful people who have helped me immensely. I am part of the Sony Alpha A200 forum and I have learned (and now teach others) tons about the camera we have in common.

I just joined a new group that seems just as active: Alpha Strobist, a group dedicated to learning to use my brand camera with various flash units. Flickr is a great site.

I not only examined Flickr, but also Photobucket and Picassa. I like Flickr better because it is just so much bigger than the others; the community really makes Flickr what it is.

I can think right off of a couple ways to use Flickr in education. Every year I assign a project on the play we read in our textbooks, "The Diary of Anne Frank." I hadn't been as in tune with Flickr previously, but now I can recommend that they find photos on Flickr to decorate their projects as I am sure that there are photos of Anne Frank's hiding place and other things from her life.

I also know that Flickr can be a nice writing prompt. I can see students using the site to find a photo to then make up a story, or describe a scene. I am always trying to get them to use more descriptive words in their writing, so maybe if they pick the photo, they will do a better job. I think if they find the picture on their own, they will have better buy-in on the rest of the activity.

Activities such as the last one would help foster creativity and collaboration, the first of the NETS-S Standards. The fifth standard, promoting digital citizenship, is promoted as they also learn about safely using Flickr's search tools and about copyright issues involving the use of content created by others.

Social Bookmarking Re-visited

I am a fanatic about clutter. What's that have to do with social bookmarking tools such as Delicious.com?Well, clutter is why I had to start over again with for this assignment.

I had a Delicious account and the button was right on my toolbar, but I was cleaning up my toolbar and eliminating things that, well, cluttered it up.

That's why  had to start again, and I am glad that I did. I got stuck in the old way of doing things and had a ton of bookmarks--some I don't remember why they were marked in the first place--that I should have had organized with a social bookmark.

I sure wish I had continued marking, but at least I am back into the groove. I have a ton of photography web sites I need to keep track of and I really wish I had been using it. When I was using it previously, it was usually to keep track of interesting articles that I wanted to blog about or about marking the blogs of friends.

I think that social bookmarking site will be excellent for when I assign a persuasive essay. Students usually have a hard time committing to and/or picking a topic. I could give them a choice of four or five topics and assign them to even numbers of students. Then all the students who have that topic can be looking for links and marking them for use by the others.

This would address a number of the NETS-S Standards: Communication and Collaboration, Research and Information Fluency, and Digital Citizenship. It will be interesting to see how they work together while they also work on their own toward their own essays.

Feed Me!

I can't believe that it took me so long to get on board with RSS. It is silly, really.

I am a champion web surfer and I visit a lot of blogs; that was especially so when I was writing one of my own. I seem to recall that I tried one or two times to set up a feed, but something didn't work and I wasn't that desperate to have one, so I moved on.

I am so glad that I had no choice this time.

So I set up accounts with Google Reader and Bloglines. I am probably go with Google Reader because I like to stay with one team as much as possible: I already have used Chrome, the Google browser, for a long time, I am a big fan of Google Wave, and I have always used them for searches, so why not keep everything in the same place?

I don't know if it is because I read our textbook first or that I had something on the "to-do" list, but it was very easy to set up the reader in both Bloglines and Google Reader. I had a bit of a struggle with Bloglines because I couldn't figure out how to make it so that there were only headlines in my inbox instead of digests like I have it set in Reader. I still couldn't find that function even after searching help. I am sure it must be there and I am just missing it. Anyway, set-up was fairly easy.

I can see now what I was missing all of this time. I am really big into photography and my bookmarks are littered with things I wanted to remember, but now I feel I can clear up some of that clutter as long as I have a feed to that particular site. So I found some photography sites and added some of my favorite news sites and technology site. It was very simple and I am not done yet.

For the classroom, the benefit will be obvious. Imagine when students are working on a topical essay and they get a daily dose of the newest news and opinion right to one place for their viewing pleasure. I think they should be excited about that.

The technology standard on research and information fluency can be reached and practiced much easier with an RSS feed. There is definitely a great advantage to using an RSS feed. I am glad I finally did it.

Technology gets me Excited!

I don't know what it is, but technology really excites me. It can even be useless technology.

But when something comes along that I feel has a great application to my work or my life, I get really excited and I can't wait to try it.

That's what happened this weekend when I finally decided to dig in and see what Google Wave was all about.

Now I still don't think I really know what's up with the Wave, but the picture is becoming clearer to me. You see, to me--if I understand correctly what a wiki can do--Google Wave is like a wiki on steroids.  I was excited this week to learn and scheme about how I can use wikis in my classroom, now I am really excited.

I can't show you my Wave because it isn't available for public launch yet. If I link to it here at my own computer, it automatically takes you to my personal list of Waves, so if you want to go to the information site, watch a video on it or something, well,  just Google it.

I may be wrong but the Wave is going to be big. It is like a wiki in many ways and, in fact, after looking at the various wiki applications available, might have exactly the same sort of things a wiki has: the ability to have a number of people collaborate on a document, the ability to add links, pictures, video, maps, etc., to said document, and the ability to control who is allowed to do all of these thing to the document.

I think the advantage of Google Wave are not necessarily what it does now, but what it might do in the future. Since the project is open source, Google will have thousands of people putting their creative energies to work to find ways to make cool applications for Wave. In fact, they already have quite a few: You can play Sudoku, chess, plan a trip, and many other things I can't recall. Oh, you can even have a weather widget or a poll inside the document.

Google wave is going to be big, and I am excited, but for now I have created a page on Wikispaces.
My page is called What's the What? and refers to a saying I have to help my students remember a grammar rule.

I chose Wikispaces because it had a clean and simple user interface and that is important because I know 8th graders very well, and if there is any little roadblock to using something, they will give up and figure they have a good excuse for not having accomplished anything. Wikispaces looked simpler than Wetpaint  and PBworks mysteriously didn't work for me. When I got the email that I needed to click to activate my account, it never went to my account. Oh, well.

My first page on Wikispaces is a simple page for students to collaborate on understanding, defining, and providing examples of metaphors and similes, a skill they that is part of the 8th grade language arts curriculum.   I figure that we could collect quite a data base that would rival anything I tell them to write down in their notes. Not only that, but I don't have to do all the thinking! They get to think!

This note-type wiki is the most obvious and I imagine, most common use of a wiki; however, I am also excited about the implications for students to discuss literature, ask questions, answer other's questions, and otherwise interact with the text in a higher-ordered thinking kind of way.

I also think there is something that I can do on a wiki that will make writing essays a more valuable experience for them too. I have to investigate that a bit more though. If anyone has a step-by-step tutorial on how to use a wiki to teach students essay skills, I am all ears.

The use of wikis in general address a number of technology standards: Students will be communicating and collaborating (standard 2), they will be strengthening research and information fluency skills (standard 3), they will engage in critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making (standard 4), they will be participating in digital citizenship (standard 5) and they will be strengthening their overall technology skills (standard 6). Wiki's are great on so many levels!

Check out wiki's, catch Google's Wave!