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.

Mixedink: Write democratically

By now, many people will have used wikis, blogs, Google Docs, Zoho or something similar to get their students collaborating on a task. They all enable multiple editors to work on a piece of writing, be it a poem, a practical report, a letter, a procedure or an essay.

Mixedink also allows people to collaborate but it differs in the execution and is aimed towards getting larger groups to work together.

Anyone can start a piece of work for any purpose. As with other services, invites are sent to potential collaborators. If for example you write a letter to the government of Japan complaining about whaling, collaborators can read and rate your work. They also have the option of writing their own version and while they do, paste in and modify the best bits from your letter. When they are happy with it they publish their version and then other collaborators can repeat the process until there are many versions, each rated by their peers. At the end of a period set by the organiser of the letter/article etc the version with the highest rating is the 'winner'. Below is a demo video:

MixedInk from MixedInk on Vimeo.

Implications for teaching:

Collaboration in all forms is an essential skill and this service could be a great way to inspire and direct students to think about a given topic. The rating system encourages analysis of existing ideas and the drafting process encourages synthesis. One problem that many students have is in drawing on a number of secondary sources to create their own work. We have all had to mark a zillion cut-and-paste horrors. Plagiarism is something that can't be overcome without explicit teaching of how best to stitch together concepts and ideas. This tool has the potential to assist teachers and students to examine the process of writing a good piece that uses other's work ethically.

As with all work involving collaboration online, care would haveto be taken to set guidelines for students re: language, personal attacks etc. but this should be standard for all classrooms anyway. 

The rating system does have the potential to favour popular students and we don't necessarily want the physically attractive yet illiterate students to have their work rated highly. I would advocate having the students set up anonymous accounts that only the teacher knows the true name for. It is a shame that Mixedink hasn't prepared for educational users by allowing educators  to create class sets of numbered IDs like a couple of other web 2.0 services do. Maybe later.

Likewise there might be some hurt feelings for students whose work is rated lowly. This is something that students should be prepared to deal with and it is an opportunity for some real self-examination ie "did I work hard enough?", "how can I improve my writing?", "Why did Jenny's get rated so highly?"

 

Some ideas for use:

Interclass debates: Imagine if the main arguments for and against were assigned to whole classes or even year levels. An interesting way to see what arguments would hold the most weight with a large number of people

Writing an 'issue' letter: Write to government or a company to voice your discontent or otherwise about an issue.

Story writing: Set the class a character, problem, setting etc and let them create.

School newsletter: Crowdsource an article on any topic

Student council: Prepare submissions to the school executive about an issue of concern to students.

You get the idea!

What I'd like to see for educators:

1) The ability to create bulk logins for students.

2) As mentioned above, the rating system could become a popularity contest. I would like an alternative rating system that rates work according to an algorithm involving number of visitors, average time spent reading the article divided by length of article, number and amount of paragraphs copied etc.... but then, I am a maths teacher. 

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.

Handy classroom organisation tools

I was reading a post on Classroom 2.o the other day and came across a reference to two delightfully simple tools for classroom organisation.

Termites for creating seating plans and
Monkey, for creating productive groups

I have always wanted some tools for this purpose and had toyed around with Excel and just couldn't seem to get it right.

Termites allows you to input 'relationship' scores for your students. That is, if you think that they work well together you give them a score up to +10 and if you'd rather that they didn't sit together you'd give them a score as low as -10. The generator takes these values into account when allocating seats. If you have a student who has poor eyesight you can specify that they are placed at the front of the room. If you have a real firecracker you can even 'glue' them to the seat closest to you so that you can keep a wary eye on them and everyone else will be shuffled around them.

Creating the table layout is also blindingly simple. You are presented with a grid of whatever size you like. You then click on a box to make it a table and click on it again to clear it. Very easy to set up rows or pods.

Monkey works on the same principle of entering relationship values but also gives you the opportunity to input an 'ability' score from 0 to 100. You then have the opportunity to group according to ability as well as taking into account the relationships. Group size and number is customised in the same way as for Termites and so is 'glueing' a student into a group.

Try them out, they are as educational software should be. Easy, simple, created by an educator, useful and free!

It takes the hassle out of making new seating plans and you could choose to have a different plan ever week if you so desired with a press of the button.

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

Wikis and Blogs in Education

As well as presenting a professional development session on VoiceThread last week I also presented the following session:

| View | Upload your own

The title was a bit of an 'in' joke. I was going to present on screencasting as well but it was just going to be toooo much.

As with the VoiceThread I wanted to focus on the why rather than the how of wikis and blogs. So much professional development is about how to put an image in or how to embed content but doesn't address the "show me the educational value" side of the equation.

I got good feedback, other than a couple of people who wanted more time to do the how. Oh well, I guess I will have to organise some follow-up sessions.

Picnik, minus the ants

I have come across an excellent online photo editing tool. Picnik offers all of the basic editing features that you would need for touching up photos. Resizing, cropping, rotating, colour manipulation plus added effects make this a very convenient application. There is an addon for Firefox and an extension for Explorer available so that with a click of the right-mouse button you can be editing any online image in Picnik.

Educational use:
Any time you have students working on wikis, blogs, VoiceThreads, Photostory, PowerPoints, you name it, there is a use for this application.

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.