Week 4: Podcasting

Well, now that was a busy week. It’s amazing at just how many things you can accomplish and check off your to-do list while listening to your iPod, with a podcast running in the background. I found that my favorite podcasts are live music concerts, most of the great ones from NPR. I’ve had a Leonard Cohen show in its entirety since my son was born last Feb. 25, 2009. I can still remember what track was playing when I ran to catch the elevator, excited to bring him home for the first time.

More recently, it was listening to Wilco podcasts while painting the dining room and getting all the chores done before the masses show up for the birthday party. The point is, podcasts can go anywhere with you: shoveling, biking, doing laundry….the list goes on.

The only place that I think Educational Podcasts could go wrong, is if they don’t keep their content interesting enough for the kids of today, then they’re just going to keep playing games, texting, or listening to music on their portable devices. The idea of an educational podcast for a student to take with them wherever they go is great, but only if they’ll LISTEN to it wherever they go. That’s why for my first podcast, I want my students to try introducing the CD that will be handed out to students who made a charitable donation to help Haiti in the last couple months. (Podcast link below)

http://web.mac.com/herman75/HermansHead/Mr.Hermans_Blog/Entries/2010/2/28_Size_Zero.html

I think that podcasting can be most powerful for students if it’s them who are creating the podcasts for each other. They an take ownership of what they created, and have a sense of pride when another student uses that podcast to help better understand a topic they struggled with before. I’m looking forward to teaching my kids GarageBand. I found that it handled ALL the audio files I has, no matter the type, unlke Audacity. Audacity was way to picky about what files it could read. My Mac’s GarageBand (from back in 04) still reads new files being released today (like MP4). Can Apple see the future?

Week 3 Reflection (plus leftovers)

(Because last week I thought and wrote just about blogs, I will reflect on how great iGoogle and wikis are.)iGoogle: After only a few weeks using iGoogle (and having my gmail account) it is my new homepage on all of my computers, both work and home. It is so nice to have all the websites, links, documents, email....the list goes on and on....all right there in the same place. I can follow all of my blogs and have them right at my fingertips whenever I want to read new material, or search through archived materials at site that I frequent. I can also see this as a HUGE help to many of my disorganized middle school students who can't find what they need, ever. Not only would iGoogle further promote the use of technology already in place at my school, but it would also open up the world of Web 2.0 and all its capabilities now, so that students can become comfortable, and proficient with the tools that they will need in the future. Luckily, Google and iGoogle are not blocked by my school system, which is surprising because soooooo many sites are blocked. Sections of Google are blocked out, such as YouTube and other photo and social networking, chatting capabilities are disabled, but what it could still be used for both in school, and then at home as well. If all the students signed up for a gmail account, and created their own iGoogle page, it would be a place to keep them organized as well as have that personal touch that will make their education more interactive with up-to-date information that they can tailor to their own tastes and preferences. The google docs are compatible with any version of Microsoft Word, or word processor that almost any computer would be able to read, students could just save all their work as google docs for all their classes. The spread sheets docs could be useful in math and science, the presentation doc and word processor gives students the ability to create, save, share and most importantly access on any other computer that has an Internet connection. No software to download, and the programs work so fast that their instant-gratification needs will be met, hopefully preventing them from surfing to other areas of the web. Having teachers monitor the usage in school and parents at home of iGoogle, is key, but i think that with all the appropriate apps that students can tailor to their own interests is enough to keep them surfing around the iGoogle pages and its related pages and apps is what makes this a great tool for today's high-energy, short attention span students.

Wikis: My favorite wiki of all time has to be what started off as Wookiepedia.org, but changed hands so many times that the domain name is different, but just by typing the original name will get you there as well. It was the quickest way for me to get any Star Wars trivia answer that may have stumped me, so that I could save face with my, then, 8-year-old nephew. Learning that the word wiki meant quick somehow made me think of all the times I'd jump online to look some up at Wookiepedia.org for Dylan, and then ending up surfing around to all the links in each description, learning new, fascinating nuggets of information that may come in handy some day if i'm ever in the Cash Cab and have a $200 red light challenge about the destruction of the 1st Death Star. I digress, wikis are great for create new and interesting connections for students, connections that may not be available through natural means for them. I'm not saying that reading online and seeing videos of Old Faithful erupting is a good replacement of being there in person to watch it happen, but its and experience nonetheless. And so many of these experiences that inner-city and other less fortunate students may otherwise not have are search-able and available quickly, just like students want. There are so many wikis out there other than Wikipedia.org, which happens to be the one mostly all my students know and use, but now that I've shown them there are more topic-specific wikis out there on the information superhighway, they seem to be more interested in them. My students also like the fact that they can link to many other sources outside the wiki page because it helps to give them more sources for research purposes. I'm looking forward to starting up a wiki and contributing to one as well now that I have a brand new laptop that is about as 'wiki' as it gets. The personal wiki I've started is at: http://scottherman.pbworks.com/Scott-Herman%27s-Wonderful-Life

Week 2 Reflection...

I spent the entire week in blogs up to my eyeballs. Swimming in a sea of blogs. And there are blogs for everyone about everything and anything out there. Like all of the other information out on the web, some of it is good and some is crap. Even before reading about blogs in our two texts I was reading a couple of my friends blogs. One of my friends writes a blog as part of his job for eWeek.com where he covers Google. My other friend, who is a journalist, writes a more personal blog (www.the40yearplan.com) where he looks for answers to solve the worlds many problems.

Because of the first few classes of EDT696 I began to follow an RSS feed on Cloud Computing from the same site where my friend the Google beat, and even suggested to my students to conduct searches on Google or Bing about their favorite books, or genre of books to find blogs, and many of them came back the very next day already involved in online conversations about some of their favorite books and authors. A few of the girls called each other to both get on the same discussion thread at a Twilight blog. So the power of blogging to me really came through in the vast array of blogs out there, the topics that are being covered out there are constantly expanding.

I decided to add to the growing pool of information out on the web this week by creating a daily blog on a topic that I’m passionate about, music. After looking at a bunch of possible blogging sites to create my music blog, I chose tumblr. I liked the way that it looked, had many templates to choose from, and was very user friendly. For the past five days I have been updating the site daily and have even gotten some feed back through friends at facebook. It was great to hear that first person comment that they look forward to my daily posts to new music. You can check it out at: http://scottherman.tumblr.com/

The one thing that I didn’t like about the blog at tumblr.com was the option of visitors leaving feedback on your site wasn’t an option. So, I found a third-party site that added on that option to my blog at tumblr. The site is called disqus.com (http://disqus.com/comments/) and is awesome. Even if I want my students to see I link that I make to, lets say, a Haitian Relief effort link where we’ve discussed and studied similar information in class, now they can leave comments on the post with just their initials. They wouldn’t have to give out their names, and by using initials would all know who each other were.

And if I was to have the students set up their own blogs, I would want to give them the freedom to choose the topic that they blog about and where their blog is hosted so that they can have the same type of ownership feeling over their product as I do. Whatever they are passionate about can be turned around and compared to the literature we discuss in class, as well as the help it will give to their writing practice.

Week 1 Reflection...

Weblogs, Blogs, and my new gmail account have kept me busy this week. I really wish that I could incorporate blogs into my curriculum in the near future, but after an interesting week on the technology front at my school, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The idea of a blog seems to be what I already can create in the form of a conversation in my classroom after we’re done reading a story or chapters from the class novel. Posing questions to a class on a blog would be less interactive than an actual conversation.
I read a slew of blogs this week to see what was out there. Everything from sports and entertainment blogs to my best friend’s blog, the infamous Ken Krayeske who asked Jim Calhoun about his salary this time last basketball season. And the one thing that held true amongst most of them were that the comments that followed the blog all seemed to be dated hours apart from each other, sometimes days, whereas a conversation that I would have with my students not only could be accomplished in “real-time” but would also let me steer the conversation in certain ways when need be.
I do think that blogs would be a great creative outlet for students and a place for the more soft spoken classmates to feel more comfortable participating and sharing their ideas. I’ve spent so much time arguing about how we use the technology in our school to prepare students for CMT tests that they’ll ultimately take with a pencil and paper, I hope that all the new ideas I go to her with won’t seem to far out there. I think that the best use for blogging amongst my students would be to share new information that they encounter for the connections that many are lacking because of an insufficient amount of meaningful prior knowledge. I mean that in the nicest way….really. They love to read and learn new things, but many of the 7th graders I’ve taught have had real difficulties making valid connections with the type of vivid imagery and details that would knock the scorer’s pants off. If students were given a few guidelines and the proper websites to start at, the possibilities of where their minds could take them, and in turn where they could take their classmates would be meaningful learning experiences that they could all share with each other.
The blog could ultimately be a place where they could share ideas and give suggestions to classmates that might otherwise hold their comments to themselves in class. A blog would give them some time to digest their thoughts on the different topics before responding to any of their classmates. The blog could make it more on their time.