Podcasting

The presenter: Wes Fryer
The gist: find the information http://handouts.wesfryer.com/podcasting
his website http://www.speedofcreativity.org/

• he uses radio wilow web- digital show and tell...can add and show notes eg hyperlinks writing is the most powerful form of writing...it connects my ideas and my writing...to media and the web...use music not just speaking
  http://learninginhand.com/
  
• use a planning guide to help students and teachers go about creating a podcast and show much more than a podcast. http://mps.mpsomaha.org/willow/radio/podcastbooklet.pdf
• he uses a online timer - for discussion Timeme.com/timer-stopwatch.htm
  attention grabber is clapping and clicking
  
• podcasts improved literacy ...real audience eg parents, realtives etc and their peers
  difference between podcast and audio on the web...link on website says xml and itune
  ip tv...there is a convergence of computer, tv and phone..
  podcast are part of this convergence
  subscribe to podcasts use a podcatcher itune store you can subscribe
  search for wes fryer get his channels video podcasts
  
• use audacity...free online editing..also need a lame file to make it work
  celebrate oklahoma voices.us project
  
• digital backpack....what you need eg camera, recorder, headset, falshdrive, memory stick for camera
  http://wiki.celebrateoklahoma.us/Home/resources/handouts/audacity-quickstart.pdf?attredirects=0
  
• audacity uses different layers..import music and move around....envelope tool to reduce volume of section..none of us like hearing us ourselves...sit and watch your self or listen and this helps you improve....practise using the microphone at end expeort as WAV (larger) or mp3..quality bitrate eg 32 if music
  
• open podcast in itunes add art work get info add a id3 tags and artwork
  http://millsmurfee.blogspot.com/ feed eg use gcast widget in a wiki
  http://www.gcast.com/u/wfryer/mothersday2009 eg
  
• 3 sites let you eg drop.io record to web record to the web need to ring the site
  http://wiki.celebrateoklahoma.us/Home/resources/music-and-audio-resources free music

My summary: Podcasts are worth trying with students they make products creatively for "real" audiences.

The Whiteboard Challenge

Get over to the Whiteboard Challenge wiki and try your hand at one of the challenges being set for users of interactive whiteboards by teaching professionals.

Every two weeks a new challenge is being posted and participants are encouraged to blog about their exploits. What a great way to encourage both innovation and reflection in our practice.

There is a button that you can grab from my sidebar for your own blog or wiki in order to promote the event.

Why you need a start page. Netvibes is my pick.

Start page, home page, whatever you like to call it, it is the the page that greets you when you start up your browser.

Many people leave it at he default, which for a school is usually the school website or learning platform. This isn't necessarily a bad place to start, but is it the best?

Many other people keep it simple and start off with the basic Google search as their starting place. Let me tell you: that is sooo 90's.

These days it is all about personalisation of information sources. Why go looking when you can make the information come to you? Customisation is the key. It enables you to make the information come to you.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all have customisable start pages in iGoogle, MSN and My Yahoo! iGoogle and My Yahoo! work pretty well and both allow you to add and remove different elements like search boxes, RSS feeds, calendars, games and widgets.
MSN is the most restrictive of the three allowing only basic changes to content.

I was a long time user of iGoogle and you can see my start page below:

iGoogle - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: iGoogle

You can see that I had customised it so that I was getting the latest news from New Scientist, Science Daily, Techcrunch and others and that my latest emails were also on hand. For fun I had a pregnancy countdown for my new baby-to-be.

If you look closely you can see the option to add more tabs which means that you can effectively customise any number of pages and have them close at hand.

However for the past few months I have moved over to using Netvibes, which along with Pageflakes, makes the customisable homepage more of a social experience. You can save and share tabs and even your whole 'universe' ie all of your tabs together. You can browse other peoples tabs and add them to your home page.

Here is mine below:

Netvibes - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Netvibes

At first glance it looks the same as iGoogle. But here's why I like it better:

• You can customise the number of columns
• More colour options
• You can fit more information in the same amount of space
• The social side of it, browsing and sharing tabs
• A huge gallery of widgets to choose from
• French people made it, so of course it is magnifique!
  

Imagine using it with your students. You could make a tab with feeds and links to resources for a course or assignment to get them going in the right direction. Students could share tabs that they create with peers. As a minimum, students will be able to group all of their educational links on one page.

If you zoom in on the top left of my example you will see an RSS feed from the discussion forum of a Wetpaint wiki that my students are working on. I have a constant eyeball on what they are doing. My professional reading comes to me. I have all my science feeds and web2.0 feeds on hand.

I would be interested if there is anyone out there using Pageflakes who can let us know its benefits...

IWBs in Secondary: Where is the Interaction?

Here is a presentation I made for the 21st Century Learning conference in Hong Kong.

The key idea is that IWBs are a great tool, but they aren't inherently interactive. Interactivity really depends on the teacher and the pedagogy used.

| View | Upload your own

Make your own newspaper clippings

Comparison: Google Sites vs Wikispaces vs PBwiki

The battleground is set: Google has finally unleashed it's version of what a wiki should look like after buying one of the, at the time, major players, JotSpot, back in 2006.

How does it stack up when compared with two of the current most popular wiki providers to educators?

Read this doc on Scribd: Google Sites vs Wikispaces vs PBwiki

PBwiki: I have used PBwiki on the past, it was my first 'wiki love'. I administered a wiki that was used by 80+ students who created over 600 pages. It was mostly stable but the major problem was that students had difficulty with formatting. They kept expecting it to act like Word and for all that the editor is supposedly WYSIWYG: WYS is not always WYG. In particular they found tables tricky and formatting around images.

I spent quite a bit of time on their forums, there were some helpful users but the prevalence of spam made it look like the support staff were not keeping on top of things. They have since migrated the forums to a more professional looking provider so let's hope that support has improved.

I am now really looking forward to PBwiki 2.0. I received notification of an impending invite to the beta so I'll let you know how it goes once I have signed up and played around. One of the most highly anticipated features is page level access which seems to have been implemented with teachers in mind. It will enable the admin to restrict a student's access to only their pages, their group's pages, or their course pages depending on what you want the wiki to do.

Wikispaces: I have been using Wikispaces more often than PBwiki of late because I like the clean lines, all of it's components seem better integrated and because they give so much more storage space. It also looks a little like Wikipedia so students have that instant recognition of what it is for.

The lack of variety in fonts and colours is a double-edged feature. On the negative side, pages can look downright boring, on the positive side, students spend less time mucking around with formatting and concentrate on the content. Embedding HTML elements has always gone smoothly for me, unlike once or twice when PBwiki did not like what I was trying to embed.

Google Sites: What can Google possibly have to this offer in this already mature field?

1. Seamless integration of Google Apps



2. A huge wealth of expertise in making things just work



3. A nice interface

So far, in the limited time that I have been testing it out, the WYSIWYG editor has worked as advertised. Tables have behaved properly and uploading files has been a cinch. Embedding Youtube videos was, of course, effortless.

But then they have gone and done something weird. Google sites is only open to organisations signed up to Google apps. I can't just sign in with my Google ID. As an individual I can't make my own Google site, to organise a family reunion, say without buying a domain. You need a corporate or education domain so as a teacher I was able to set one up using my school email address and the domain of my school. Its odd but I guess they have their reasons. No doubt the news is out there and I just haven't read it yet.

Quizlet: Rote learning can be fun?

Quizlet is an excellent resource for those students trying to remember definitions, dates, conjugations, names, places, formulae….whatever

Put simply is a site where you input questions and answers and it then tests you on those answers after first familiarising you with them using 'guess and check' type strategies. It will keep hitting you with the things you get wrong until you get them right. It tests you in several different ways, type in the answer, multiple-choice and true or false. There is also an embeddable 'Scatter' activity which is my favourite.

Here is one that I whipped up with a measley 3 terms:



There are already many such quizzes that have been entered by other students and teachers. A look at the home page shows quizzes with titles like: French colours, The industrial revolution, Latin Vocabulary and Geometry Rocks. You can of course search for relevant quizzes


Possible ways to integrate it into your program:

- Individual learning: just alert the students to its existence
- Allocate groups to create quizzes on topics that you allocate or they nominate and try them out on other class members
- Language teachers: conjugate –er verbs in French. Pin yin to English for Chinese
- Students evaluate existing quizzes for accuracy and relevance to your topic
- Set up a glossary for the unit you are working on and have the students complete it and send a screenshot to you of their best scores
- The whole class contributes to a quiz on your thematic unit. Have each student add 2-3 terms.
- Make the construction of an accurate quiz part of an assessment task
- Next year, have the students do one of the above tasks and compare it to what your class did the year before. Students can evaluate their ideas as a comparison. Did they miss things? Did they think of something beyond the last class?

Comiqs: Create comics from photos and art

Engaging some students in literacy tasks can be difficult. Comic books have long been recognised as an effective way of getting students, particularly boys, to read. Now, a web 2.0 site in beta, Comiqs, provides a simple interface to create comics from any images that you fancy. You simply drag across the layout you would like for a page, upload and drag across photos and add speech and thought bubbles. Added functionality includes the option to access your Flikr account from within Comiqs.

Making your own comics is nothing revolutionary, you have always been able to make make comic strips using Word or PowerPoint (or pencil and paper!). However, Comiqs includes the functionality of comments, sharing and embeddability. Here is my lame attempt, created in five minutes from one of my own photos, it is only one page, but multiple pages are easy to set up:

It is not the only site that enables you to do so. I should also mention Comeeko, but a word of caution, some of the advertising is not suitable for children.

Educational applications:

- Junior science: Students could make a comic highlighting lab safety; create a
- biography of a scientist
- Primary/Secondary Literacy/English: Create short stories; develop characters for everyday objects; create biographies or autobiographies
- Art/Design: What layouts work; Colour combinations; Scan and upload work
- History: Biographies
- Languages: Dialogue