Room With A View

I, and many others, spent this afternoon and all of Monday working with Jay McTighe. Our school is adopting Understanding by Design as our main framework for unit planning. I enjoyed the workshop sessions but I was frustrated by the lack of technology tools available to me as I worked. When planning, we used large paper copies of the UbD templates. It would have made much more sense to have electronic templates. Also, we don’t have our school’s standards and benchmarks available electronically—yet. My last school used Rubicon Atlas and it was so much more efficient to choose relevant benchmarks from all subject disciplines via a pull down menu. We’re moving in that direction at our school but we’re not there yet. Meanwhile I need to be patient.

Here’s a quick and relatively simple example of using rss and mp3’s in the classroom.

A music teacher at my school creates mp3’s for her students so they can learn their parts in the high school choir. She plunks out each part—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—on the piano and records them on a minidisk player. (Usually, she only records the tricky parts in each piece.) She has been putting the files on a shared drive so that the students can copy and paste them to their USB drives or e-mail the files to themselves.

The process has been relatively successful but class time is lost while the students download the files or sometimes students “forget” to download them. There is a community choir event coming up. Continuing the present process would mean members from the community would have to have access to the school’s network or some other way of accessing the files. Burning CD’s is an option, but it would be time consuming and a waste of disk space because each person only needs two or three small files.

After listening to the teacher it struck me that this would be a good application for rss. I helped her move her existing files to space on the school’s webserver, and showed her how to set up an rss feed using Listgarden. Now people can subscribe to the feed in iTunes or the podcatching software of their choice. The result?

It’s too earlier to tell but I anticipate no excuses from students who “forgot” to download the files and less class time lost to the management of mp3’s. Once students subscribe to the feed, they’ll automatically receive new files whenever the teacher posts them. Simple but cool!