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:

Podcasting by Committee Cont.

September 8 - So the big day arrived. Heather Dowd, our fearless technology coach and I team-taught the lesson. We decided to work with the students in the library as this would allow them to spread out, making it easier to record their voices without distraction. After teaching three groups we debriefed. The following were some of our take-aways:

• Students loved the lesson and were on task throughout. This was true for students who often have trouble focusing.
• I should have assigned the script (student fill in indicated areas) for homework to allow them more time to learn how to create a podcast using Garage Band.
• Very few students accessed the Garage Band instructions that Heather put together and linked to Blackboard; most either forged ahead on their own, asked us for help, or got help from students who had worked with GB before. (When we were asked, Heather and I directed students back to the directions.)
• After students finished their work, these student "experts" naturally started circulating, helping others.

September 9: The next morning, the 7th grade SS team (Sarah Becker, Doug Behse, and I), and Heather met with Apple Distinguished Educator Kathleen Ferenz. We spoke about how the lesson went the day before and then Kathleen came up with her plan for how to do it differently. These are the changes she made:

• Instead of using my script (an idea Chris received from an ADE who visited last year), Kathleen had students put their information in a table; the idea being that students would talk more naturally using these notes instead of my script. She had students do this in Pages rather than Word as "Pages is a multimedia tool rather than a simple word processor." (More on this later from Chris.)
• Kathleen had students move all of the graphics to iPhoto so that students could start archiving these for future use/reference. She also had them cite their photos by putting the URL in the iPhoto description box.
• She also had the students use Keynote to create their podcast intead of Garage Band. She feels that Keynote is better for short, one minute presentations, giving these presentations a more natural feel. It is more like a Powerpoint with voice over. You must make the audio in one take whereas you can do Garage Band audio in segments.

After the class we sat down again to discuss and compare the two lessons. I came away with a lot of new ideas, but I will need to work more with both podcast formats before I have a feel for what I think works best for which assignments. One thing is for sure, I got a lot of buy-in from my students. Most did not finish their podcast during the period, and even though I told students I would give them more class time, many dropped by to work on them. I saw them helping each other, working to perfect their assignments, and, without realizing it, they were going over the content multiple times and really mastering it. Time well spent! Chris will now take podcasting to a higher level with his math students.

Podcasting by Committee

September 1 - Like Abbot's Costello and Laurel's Hardy (Heather and Chris, I know these names may not be familiar to you young'ins but you can now Youtube them!), when it comes to this enterprise, I often feel like the sidekick that everyone likes but secretly feels sorry for..."Chris, how do I find our blog again?" So when Chris asked me to teach our students how to create a podcast, I was naturally a little apprehensive. Yes, I knew what a podcast was and had actually listened to a few, but I didn't know the first thing about making one, much less helping my students do so. In any case, I've decided that the best way to approach this year is to embrace anything that puts me out of my comfort zone so I agreed.

September 2 - The very next day, Heather swung by my room to chat. She informed me that Kathleen Ferenz, a Apple Distinguished Educator, would be in school the following week and wanted to know if I wanted to work with Kathleen on a lesson. We decided that we would have my students create a podcast about the obscure capital city names that my computers have been christened with -- Ouagadougou, Ashgabat, Bandar Seri Begawan.... Furthermore, the podcast would reinforce the concepts of location and place that we had been working on in class. Heather offered to create a set of instructions for students to follow. We thought of using Camtasia, but decide a simple flowchart on a word document would be easier for students to refer as they could "jump in and out" depending on their previous knowledge set. I also created a script that students could plug their information into and set the following learner outcomes:

• Students will use the Internet to learn about an obscure capital city.
• Students will learn how to take a photo of them selves using Photo Booth.
• Students will learn how to store graphics/photos in their Drop Box.
• Students will learn how to create a podcast that includes both graphics and audio by following a set of instructions.

Finally, we decided that we would do the lesson on Thursday and then have Kathleen work with my Day 2 students on Friday after giving her our feedback from the previous day.

To be continued...

What's In a Name?

Apparently quite a bit.  Our blog has been up and running for 4 days, we have 0 followers, have discussed it with 2 people, and there has already been 1 request to change the blog's name.  Now to come clean, Craig and I just went with a somewhat mundane name so that we could get on with posting things, with the understanding that we could change the name later, but come on...4 days.

The quibble is over the inclusion of the word "tech" and has come about in part due to a visit to our school by Alan November.  The idea being that while we are making very explicit decisions to include more technology in our classrooms, the focus is not really about "technology", but more importantly about impacting "learning".  It just so happens, that in this case, technology is the tool we are wielding.

So...it is back to the drawing board.