I came across this page listing free academic podcasts. One needs to do some digging to see what relates to K-12 education but some of the courses appear to hold promise. Biology for Elementary Teachers and Film As Literature look interesting. There are a diverse group of subjects listed ranging from Biology to Poetry.
There’s plenty of buzz about podcasting these days. It makes me wonder why and is this just a fad? What is compelling within the medium that will make it become embedded in current pedagogy? Should it become embedded? I won’t answer these questions here—at least not today. Today my advice is to think small.
There are teachers out there that are doing elaborate podcasts, complete with theme music and transitions between stories—great. But it’s time consuming. My guess is that teachers that do complete polished shows, do so on their own time. They’re not doing it during school hours. Assuming podcasting deserves to be an embedded pedagogy, time is what will prevent it from becoming one. So here’s my tip, keep it simple. Use the KISS principle. Rather than trying to do elaborate polished shows, do bite sized chunks. Have a show that contains one small bit of information. Because of RSS this is entirely doable.
One small chunk can be published one day and the next chunk can be published the next day. Because of RSS iTunes can pick up the chunks when they’re ready. Here’s an example from one of our music teachers.
Each autumn our school has a concert involving choir students, band students, orchestra students, and members of the community. There’s a guest conductor. It’s no stretch to say it’s a really big deal. The final couple of pieces involve the entire ensemble. The choir teacher had the added challenge of getting community members and choir students to learn their respective parts with as few rehearsals as possible. Enter RSS. The teacher recorded each part—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass—as mp3’s. It was nothing fancy. She just plunked them out on the piano. As each one was completed she uploaded it to the school’s server and updated an RSS feed for the project. Choir members subscribed to the feed in iTunes and their parts arrived on their home computers. They practiced at home, got together for three rehearsals, and did the show. I was in the audience that night and I assure you. It was fantastic!
From a podcasting point of view it was pretty easy to do. There were no introductions or conclusions to write. There were no transitions or fancy effects to use. All was done with a minimum of editing. The lesson to take away from this is to keep it simple. Use the KISS principle.
A colleague and I have started a new group at school. We’ve created a PD group of teachers who are interested in exploring ways that technology can help us teach better. We meet once a month for a face-to-face meeting. Between meetings we’re using a wiki to keep the conversation going. We had our first meeting last Thursday. We had a great turnout and a really diverse group. I’m pumped!
Our first task was to read and discuss Marc Prensky’s article on Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. The discussion is just getting going but it can be found here.
Here’s an interesting study on game use in education. A quote I particulary like is
Far from being sidelined, teachers were required to take a central role in scaffolding and supporting students’ learning through games.
Google recently released an on-line software package called Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It is, as the name suggests an on-line word processor and spreadsheet program. I’m not sure where the Spreadsheet part came from but the Docs part—the word processor–was formerly called Writely. Google bought Writely, to much fanfare, several months ago.
I’ve had a Writely account for some time but when I first tried it, I didn’t really get it. The interface was easy enough but I didn’t see the point in an on-line word processor. Microsoft Word is available on all the machines on which I work. When I tried Writely I didn’t like writing in a web browser. It felt a bit clunky. I had tried other on-line word processors and felt the same way about them. Regardless of my early experiences, when Google announced its Docs and Spreadsheets program (a revised Writely) I decided I’d give it a try. That’s when I saw it’s potential.
To me the potential is not in the word processor per se but rather, in it’s collaboration feature. It has the collaboration benefits of a wiki with the editing/layout features of a word processor. Docs gives several people access to the same document. People can edit the document simultaneously or at different times. Here’s one teaching situation where Docs and Spreadsheets may help.
As a teacher my class often does group work. Problems come at the end of a class when students are not finished an assignment. If it was an individual assignment, I’d just assign the task to be finished for homework but how do I fairly assign a group writing assignment for homework? I can’t—until now. With Google Docs and Spreadsheets one student can post the work to Google Docs, invite the other group members to collaborate and they can easily finish the task later–working individually or simultaneously. Because of the features built into the program they can even see who in the group is pulling his/her weight and who is not. If teachers are given access to the document, they can see a complete history of the work—a handy assessment feature.
Docs has a lot of potential for group writing tasks among teachers too. Curriculum documents or common assessments can be collaboratively revised using Docs and Spreadsheets much more easily than using track changes in Word.
I don’t see myself switching to Google Docs and Spreadsheets as my main word processor but for tasks when I need to collaborate with others, it will come in handy.
Jay McTighe said something that stuck in my mind while he was at our school. He wasn’t talking about technology and education but his words can be applied to the area. He was commenting about innovation and asked, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” As a technology using educator, it’s important to always keep this idea in mind. Whenever I propose a new idea to a teacher, I need to make sure that it’s worth the effort–the squeeze. Being worth the effort means the student will learn more deeply or more quickly.
