Unplanned Connections

As Craig eluded to, I was planning on having kids practice creating a podcast in my math class as an opportunity to reinforce what they had done in social studies, as well as having the chance to learn the method that Kathleen at taught using Keynote.

I must admit that my initial intent was to just have students practice the technology so I just made my content fit.  Obviously, this isn't the preferred method, but I REALLY wanted to have the students practice creating a podcast.  The amazing thing was that as I progressed through the day, I actually stumbled into some good learning.

First Block:  Things went pretty well, but the focus was all on the technology and not so much about the content.  I did give students a basic script to follow and showed them an example from start to finish.  There were a couple of students in my class that had done this with Kathleen, so they were my natural "experts".
Big Learning - Having 20 kids simultaneously upload a 10 Mb file to you at the end of class is not a good idea.

Second Block: In response to the upload problem, I decided to reorder class so that we created our podcast at the beginning of class.  Things went much better from the tech end as I had students load their work onto thumb drives.  This was much faster.  Since I had switched things around though, we still had some work to do...then the magic happened (by accident, admittedly).  As we progressed through the rest of class, I found that I started asking questions that allowed for students to make connections between their podcast and the new learning objective.

Third Block:  Here is where things really got fun.  Since I realized, that I was going to be able to connect  the podcasts to the upcoming objective, I was able to give more specific directions at the beginning of the lesson that would allow the students to make stronger connections in the later part of the lesson.  As a result, not only did I get better podcasts, but I believe the second part of the lesson was also better as a result.

Here is a sample of what the students produced: