I have a subscription to Odiogo which creates podcasts from my blogs. I thought it might be interesting to hear someone else read my blog posts to me. I wanted to see if I could distance myself enough from the original process of writing, to think critically about the content. I’m not a confident writer and have for years avoided writing anything. And I dread rereading my published material for fear of finding mistakes. I subscribed to Odiogo for fun and for the feedback it might provide.

I’ve subscribed to the Odiogo feed in iTunes and now just to see if I could I’ve embedded a player with the feed directly on my blog.The player looks great and is customisable – the screen is blank but I think that is because I don’t have any art work on Odiogo for my podcast. I will be testing this player again on the students podcasts.

The player is free from Podcast Pickle and was extremely easy to set up. I am a fan of this site!

I started my blog about a year ago – in fact it was the first birthday of  “My ICT Journey” on March 10th!  I remember at the beginning that the concept of blogging was completely strange to me. Now, it would be completely strange not to have a blog (or two). You know that feeling you get if don’t have your mobile phone or you forget to put on your wrist watch – that’s what it would be like if I couldn’t have my blog.

With this in mind I thought I would compile the resources that helped me get my head around my purpose and understanding of blogging. I am in no way an expert especially compared to the “pro bloggers” who I read and admire, but this short list might help the beginning bloggers of the world.

I started by listening to podcasts about blogging. Blogging Vox Pops was one of the first podcasts that helped me understand why or why not I might blog: It goes for about 20 mins and is easy to listen to while you are driving or doing the housework. E-Learning Insights has a number of podcasts about blogging that are helpful.

The next thing I did was to read blogs. The more I read the more I was inspired to write. Writing was not one of my preferred past times, a hang over from being a terrible speller as a child, but blogging is short and sweet and usually illustrated – so it fits all my criteria for writing. One of my favourite blogs to read at the time was not an educational one but Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project. Michele’s blog is

“… dedicated to helping individuals and organizations use best practices and social media tools to construct life-long learning and career development systems…”

The last thing on my list would be to take part in one of the blogging challenges. Challenges such as the  “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” help to improve your blog with tips and behaviours that only other experienced bloggers know.

You can really only understand blogging by blogging. Take baby steps and write for yourself but try to post regularly. Be professional and only write/publish what you be happy to have your future employer to read. A blog can be an excellent digital portfolio.

Flickr 1st Birthday Photo:

This is the final blog of a series about using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. This section looks at  our school’s “practice run” using blogs in the classroom and the lessons we learnt.

BEGINNING BLOGGERS

We had a clear purpose, and support from the school leadership to move forward on the weblogs. Once we started our blogs, eleven in all, it became clear that we needed some guidelines to define the tone and purpose of the class blog pages. One of the surprising comments from teacher who looked at the work the others were doing but wasn’t actually a participant was that “this could be used by parents to compare teachers.” Clearly this wasn’t the tone that we wanted.

In retrospect and for the future the main philosophy /guiding principals should be:

• The class blogs are collective blogs to give you and your students a voice and a way to communicate with the local and global community. For example if you browse through “ejourney with technokids” you can see the opportunities that Web 2.0 has opened up for communicating and collaborating. According to the interview transcript shown on the blog, the students particularly enjoy talking to students in another country.
• The class blog is an avenue for students’ to construct meaning through reflection and sharing their learning with an authentic audience. TaNuj^’s Weblog is an excellent example of a student reflection. It is also for teachers as can be seen by Dean Groom’s response to the student blog.
• The blog can add impetus to the Inquiry Process through collaboration with experts in the field. [In M3’s blog on Sustainability the students each give their ideas in their own words adding to the knowledge of the individual.
• It is an opportunity to showcase your grade and the work that you and your students do, and to keep parents and the community informed.

However the impact was immediate. The communication about classroom work in the first few blogs was far more than had gone home in the past year. It was visual, informative and varied according to the class, just as each class is different each blog had an individual feel to it and the added bonus was that the first comments were from students.

Conclusion

My initial idea sounded like a simple solution to a problem. Now I understand how complex it really is and how much work there is still to do. I also understand that it was absolutely necessary to take this step…leap, …plunge into web 2.0. In fact I find it difficult to image a classroom that should not be using the web 2.0 tools in some way. I am inclined to agree with Hargadon when he said it was bigger than the printing press

One last example of web 2.0 in education, and perhaps my favorite, is an infant grade in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in Canada. The students have pre-service teachers as blogging buddies. The student teachers follow one child’s writing in Mrs. Cassidy’s blog throughout the year, responding to the child’s blogs, but noting the development in writing over the year. A win win situation all around. In an interview Cassidy explains what she does in her classroom and how each student has a blog, which is an online portfolio, and how blogging buddies work with her students. (Cassidy, WOW2 Show #91, 2008). Clearly Cassidy is an outstanding educator with very good technological skill. She has many awards to her credit, but Cassidy has shown that student age is no barrier to using Web 2.0 tools with students and how powerful it can be for communicating, creating and collaborating.

Additional Helpful Links
http://deangroom.wordpress.com/2009/01/24/the-3rs-are-now-the-3ts/

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2006/09/posting_student.html

Audio e-Learning – Helping students make sense of their learning!

How often do we ask students to rewrite information in their own words only to find what they have written is nonsensical or merely a rearrangement of the original text with some synonyms thrown in (the clever ones can do this with the online thesaurus) ? It is my experience that students are reasonably good at collecting information but much poorer at making sense of it. They can travel three quarters of the distance on their inquiry-learning journey but fail to fully complete it. They struggle to use the information they have collected to reconstruct the meaning for themselves. They might appear to have done the work but have not really answered their query or created new knowledge for themselves. However, when you ask students to paraphrase or read what they have written they will admit that they are not sure what it means or that it does not make sense. Gordon Wells emphasizes the importance of speech and writing as a means of building and clarifying knowledge.

“the fact that the processes of thinking, such as categorizing, hypothesizing, reasoning, and evaluating, are not only realized in language, in the sense of being made manifest in speech and writing, but also actually constructed and improved through its mediating means.” (WELLS, 2001)

• Students speak before they write and if we really want to know what they are thinking then the first form of communication should be oral especially for primary students who are still in the early stages of developing their writing skills.
• Finding the words to verbally report the meaning is different to finding the words to make a written report.
• Writing is more difficult than speaking and so students are much more likely to write things that do not make sense than they are to say them.
• When they speak they get immediate feedback by listening to themselves and realize that what they have said doesn’t make sense or that they don’t understand the material enough to articulate it.

While planning the curriculum for students in ICT my goal was to have the final product a spoken one so that students were more likely to access and construct information and new knowledge. I wanted to have students more involved in the process by making the realization of new information spoken not just written.

Two examples of Audio e-Learning in Practice

1. PowerPoint with Oral Commentary

My first exercise was to have grade five and six students reflect on what they had found out in their first inquiry unit. The students had completed a PowerPoint with information about their learning styles (visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic) and in which ways they were intelligent according to The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Wikipedia) defined by Howard Gardner. They had used online surveys to gather the information and wrote about the results on the slides, noting whether they thought the results were an accurate reflection or not. The final requirement was to create a verbal commentary as a summary of the information on each slide, to enhance the information presented, but not read it word for word to the audience. The students created a series of short sound files and inserted them onto the appropriate slide to play automatically within the slide show.

Technically this was not difficult, but it did challenge a number of students in terms of making the final step in their learning, constructing knowledge for themselves from the information and linking it to their experiences.

The final product with the verbal commentary was insightful and much more engaging for the audience who are usually teachers and other students. Listening to the presentations quickly gave the teacher a clear indication of the student’s critical thinking skills and at which stage of the Bloom’s Taxonomy they are operating. (CHURCHES, 2008)

2. Radio Show

The students at my school have a live one-hour radio show on a community radio station each week (97.7FM 3SER Wed 2-3pm). All students in grade 5 and 6 who want to present on the radio have the opportunity to do. The show involves script writing, collaboration with peers (they work in teams of 4), careful selection of music and practice to deliver their scripts with a credible and interesting voice.

The program has certain elements that students are expected to talk about such as their interests, a community oriented subject and a link to the current classroom inquiry unit but it can include other original material such as stories, poems, songs etc. The radio show provides a genuine audience for their work. The focus is clearly on their oral expression and the digital recording equipment is the key to helping students evaluate and improve their skills.
The students take advantage of every opportunity to interview special visitors to the school. They use the pre-recorded interviews on their show and if applicable spend time editing and adding sound effects or music to enhance the interview. Creating surveys and analyzing the results to share with their radio audience has been another popular topic for some students. This is a very powerful learning experience integrating a number of key curriculum areas with genuine purpose, written (script) and verbal (presentation on radio) articulation of results and authentic audience.

The final element of that has been added this semester is that the students select a 2-3 minute interval of their show to Podcast to iTunes . Students are excited that their work is available in the “real world” and that their parents and friends can download their personal podcast.

As the year went on it became easier to see how to add an audio component to the lessons. More importantly it became clear that students needed to make audio files as a part of their everyday work to help them develop literacy and thinking skills. There are more examples of audio e-learning on our school blog from various grade levels using a variety of programs.

WELLS, G. (2001). Action, Talk and Text: The Case for Dialogic Inquiry. In G. WELLS, Action, Talk and Text: Learning and Teaching Through Inquiry,. Teachers College Press.

Dueling Mics via Flickr by roland

Photo : students completing a radio show in our own studio

I have always been a strong believer in the importance of students’ oral language as a key step in their literacy development and in clarifying their thinking while learning. I also believe, as teachers, we tend to gloss over its importance, by not giving enough time in the school program for specific oral language development. For example the Early Years Literacy Program (used in Victorian primary schools in Australia) prescribes an hour for reading and an hour for writing every school day for students in grades P -4. Where is the dedicated time for developing oral language, especially in the early years?
Last year I was the full time ICT teacher for students in P-6 at my school and in an effort to improve my own skills in planning for oral language development I took every opportunity to introduce an audio aspect to the ICT lessons that I taught.
Below are some examples of how to integrate audio in the classroom.

Audio e-Learning and the Curriculum

It is a logical step that we should be spending more time developing students oral language skills if we want them to be good at using language to help process thinking at higher levels. I have selected the major teaching emphases for speaking recommended by the West Australian First Steps Oral Language Program to show how we can implement a digital audio e-learning program for students.
The West Australian First Steps, Oral Language Developmental Continuum was designed to provide teaching strategies to ensure that students achieve the National English Outcomes set out in the National Profiles. (EVANS & ALLEN, 1996).
The list below features an overview of the aspects of oral language that should be developed specifically to improve the student’s ability to use the speaking component of language. The features are common to all phases of development but of course the level of performance and material would become more complex as students progressed.

Major Teaching Emphases (EVANS & ALLEN, 1996)

Components, which are common to all phases of development.

• focus on language structures and patterns through songs, chants, rhymes and stories and the aesthetic features of writing
• develop student’s ability to adjust their language to suit particular purposes, audiences and situations – structure experiences that challenge students to select and use different styles of language to suit a range of audiences and purposes
• develop and extend student’s use of vocabulary in different contexts -promote the use of subject-specific vocabulary
• help students to give and receive simple explanations, information and instructions – help students to give and respond to increasingly complex explanations and instructions

Audio e-Learning

Examples of how Audio e-Learning can enhance learning

• Record and listen to students – Share with the grade, Podcast those that are popular and publish to web page. (Arrowhead Elementary School) is a great example
• Audio e-learning is the ideal way for students to practise language to suit particular audiences. Recorded can work can be shared with the grade, parents, year level, school level, published to the web and or used on a Radio Show. Recording allows for the students to receive feedback and to polish their performance.
• When students create a commentary for their Inquiry learning topics, they have the opportunity to demonstrate the use of subject specific language in context.
• Screencasting using simple recorders that come with Interactive whiteboards (Notebook Recorder is part of the SMARTBoard software) or free software downloaded from the internet such as “Jing” is an great way to create a procedural text that has a visual and verbal element. Sceencasting records all the movement on the computer screen while it records the student’s oral commentary. Eric Marcos’s Mathtrain website is an excellent example of screencasting.  (Mathtrain.tv)

There are many ways that technology can help students develop the components of oral language. The list I have provided is not exhaustive and is growing everyday as technology improves. It can be as simple as attaching a microphone to the computer and recording a sound file for a PowerPoint presentation or as complex as blogging with a mobile phone (Year 10 Agriculture).  Photostory and Voicethread are both excellent, free, software where the students’ voice can be the main form of communication.

Talk to Me -Flickr photo via Daniel F. Pigatto

Microphone – Flickr photo via sparetomato

Wordle is…

Wordle lets you create artistic word clouds with your writing or just a bunch of words that you might choose to use  to describe something. It will give greater prominence to the more frequent words

and exclude the “stop words” (words too common to visualise). The colors and designs can be customised, its free and your Wordle is yours to do as you want with it! How good is that.

Some uses for Wordle

• If you put your student’s writing into Wordles over a period of time you could see if their vocabulary is developing and if they are using subject specific language so it is possible to use Wordle as an assessment tool.
• I’ve used it as a form of art work mixed with photos and for backgrounds on pages in the school magazine. It was a great way to highlight the key words for my subject in an interesting way that would catch the readers attention with a glance.
• Use it to summarise a piece of writing.

Suggestions from the SMARTboard lessons podcast

• It could be a springboard for predicting texts. Copy a couple of key paragraphs of a text that you are using with your students to create a Wordle and then let the students predict what the text might be about and they can become familiar with unfamiliar words before beginning their reading.
• Comparing texts a lesson for secondary schools.

If you have any suggestions please add them in the comments for others to share.

Drupal a dutch word to mean drop even though the original idea was to name it dorp as in small village or community (typo). Another powerful open source product that might help revamp our very static web page into a dynamic one where a number of people can contribute. Drupal is for web site design but promotes a collaborative ownership.
It is interesting how quickly State of the Art web pages become old hat. The only way really to manage to keep it up-to-date is share the input. The static nature of web pages was a result of the specialised knowledge in designing web pages, uploading material, and or using html. According to John Jones Drupal may offer a solution.
I like the idea of letting some students have leadership for their grades in knowing the “how to” put it up with the support of their class teacher and peers in choosing “what” should represent their class on the web. I think I will try something like this next year.
The idea of having a consultant building or supporting schools to build web sites (as John Jones does) would be fantastic if it was funded by the education department. Think of the promotion for government schools!
“Moving at the Speed of Creativity”
Podcast259: Drupal for Education by John Jones 1:05:10 18/06/08 This podcast is a recording of a presentation by John Jones on June 12, 2008, titled Drupal for Education.
The Drupal web site looks to me like it would take some serious work to learn Drupal but it assures me that if I wanted to invest some time it would be possible. Maybe next holidays…

Great Podcast from the ICT guy (ICTGUY0804 – Voice Thread, Remote Access & 1 to 1    Podcast number 4 April 7th, 2008. )-  The impact of Operating Systems (OS) on the way that students and teachers work was very interesting. Comparing the 3 OS, Windows, Mac and Linux and what the computer comes with suggests what they will be used for. The Mac systems come with a creative suite of tools that students use to create multimedia products, the Linux system comes with very little hard drive space but links to online communities encouraging collaborative and communicative work, while the Windows machines come with the Microsoft Office products suggesting that they will be used for….

An interesting idea but isn’t that often how change actually takes place. For example if we want to start using the intranet in our school as the main form of communication to reduce paper we actually have to stop giving people the option. Change will only genuinely happen when we eliminate the alternative- that is the paper version.

If this is true then educators can affect a change in the way students use computers through the operating systems of the computers so they must consider carefully what they want for their learning community when they are providing technology for the classroom.

In this podcast there was also a great recording from a conference about the benefits of one laptop per student in classrooms.

ICTGUY0804 – Voice Thread, Remote Access & 1 to 1    Podcast number 4 April 7th, 2008.

I listened to two podcasts today, one from the USA (The Teachers’ Podcast Episode 6: New Literacies Make the News, Show Me the Money!, Tech Knowledge Product Review, teachers podcast) which featured a discussion about New Literacies. The discussion was about helping to students recognise genuine information and to read and evaluate internet material. They introduced the concept that ‘classical reading’ has changed. When reading online articles, reading is no longer linear because we can jump around with hyperlinks. I think as teachers we need to consider this in our lesson plans and instructions and be explicit about the reading that might be required. Multiliteracy in this case referred to online reading and the new skills that it requires as distinct from classical linear reading.

The second blog was (ICTGUY0803 – Blogs, Comic Life resources & Visualisation of data ) This blog had a great reference to presenting visual information so that it has the most effective impact on the audience. The evidence was based on cognitive scientific research of Kosslyn “Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule.” (The address for this information is: http://io9.com/tag/powerpoint/). The rules are simple and could be used as guides to help students create effective visual presentations. Perhaps a skill that is increasingly important with emerging technologies on Web2- (just look at YouTube, podcasts, messenger services, mobile phones with videos etc. etc…).

Multi-literacy to some means the ability to read, filter, and evaluate information on the web and to others to be confident and capable enough to utilise the suite of tools available on Web2; tools that communicate predominately with images and sound as well as the written word.

Post on March 10 2008

In an effort to be “well informed” and to utilize time wisely I’ve been investigating various podcasts that I could listen to on my way too and from work – about 1.5 hours each day. There are quite a few free subscription lists for educational podcasts. I think the e-learning insights and the virtual staffroom have possibilities but I plan to keep looking.