Really Simple

I've seen several RSS explanations in the past months (and I have to admit sometimes I still am confused about how to create subscriptions). I guess it is so easy to do that I think it should have more steps to learn. Mark Wagner at The Infinite Thinking Machine has just posted one of the simplest intros to Really Simple Syndication for teachers.

And now the Google has iGoogle with widgets with which I can subscribe to everything right down to my own podcasts (just to make sure they are getting through the blogosphere), RSS makes even more sense. Before I'd forget to go look in my "favorites" folder. Now they just appear everytime I open my homepage to iGoogle. Now that's really simple.

So as a teacher I have my students subscribe to daily homework updates I send as podcasts through Gcast. They think it is really cool that when they synch their iPods afterschool, they don't have to do anything but listen. Er, well listen, and then DO their homework.

Breaking Blogger's Block

As I thought about this blog entry, I realized I had some blogger's block akin to "writer's block." I've had a couple of ideas rambling about in my mind this week but nothing really came forth as the "must blog" about item. I have spent my last couple of drive times to and from work catching up on podcasts from TeahersTeachingTeachers.org. The teachers there often discuss their collaboration on the elgg YouthVoices.net. In these talks, they've presents a few worthwhile ideas on prompting student writing and blogging. So I thought I'd pass along some these today.

Unlike the blog I host with my literature students where the blogspace is devoted to discussing the texts we're studying, the Youth Voices elgg seems to be set up with the purpose of getting students to write about a variety of topics, whatever interests them. And they've come up with some great prompts or ideas of how to spur student writing that could lead to opening up discussions and collaborative posting in the blog. For instance, Paul Allison, often the moderator of TTT writes in response to the question "What do we want students to blog about in school?:

"One of the ideas we are working on with students in these
high school and middle school elggs is '20 Questions: 10 Self and 10 World'.
This is an idea that we’ve adapted from James A. Beane's from notions of
the integrated, democratic curriculum."

That sounds like a super prompt to get students involved and talking about what matters to them and their world. And from the sound of things on TTT it is yeilding some worthwhile results.

Another interesting idea I heard in a recent podcast is the idea of assigning letters of the alphabet to students to inspire their writing. The challenge for each student is to write about something that begins with a given letter. This was part of a digital storytelling project presented on a TTT podcast by Kevin Hodgson. For one project he and his sixth-grade students decided to tell stories that were each based on the alphabet scheme. Further, he considers assembling them in a variety of ways from alpha order to arrangements of words. Clever stuff.

How To Podcast and Screencast

Inspired to find out more about podcasting from a podcast posted by TeachersTeachingTeachers.org from January (post TT 35 1_10_07) that was on the topic , I attended the TeachersTeachingTeachers.com (no relation) conference held in Cranberry, PA in March. (How's that for the DNA replication and network of Web 2.0!)

Anyway, as frustrated as I was in finding the how-tos to podcast, I am delighted to find at how easy it is to podcast. Many thanks to Christopher Coole, a seventh grade math teacher from Franklin Regional School District (PA) who led the workshop I attended. Each week I'm discovering ways to do incorporate podcasts into my classroom and website. Granted I needed to buy a digital recorder. With the free download of iTunes and Audacity, and a free membership to Gcast. I've been on my way--recording assignment updates on the fly. My students are amazed that they can stay in the know on by syncing their iPods at home. Sure editing longer pieces can be more time consuming to do--a weekend project, but again, once they are in the can, I can refer students to them and save the chops. Students can listen to other class periods' Socratic Circle discussions.

I feel a bit like NPR's Lost and Found Sound team, noticing audible events to record for podcast. Not to have my recorder with me has become like being out for a walk, noticing an incredible sunset and being without a camera. Suddenly I'll be in the midst of what would make an interesting recording, only to discover didn't think to bring my recorder along--who knew there'd be great sounds here! To fill the void on how-to podcast, for the uninitiated I've published on my web site a five-page Quick Start Guide to Podcasting for Educators details the steps I've learned. Certainily there are other ways of going about it (and differences for Apple users). I only know what I know today and happy to share that. There will be a new way tomorrow. And ways exist to enhance the process with purchasable software, but this will suffice if you just want to give it a go on the cheap.

Screencasts, real-time presentations of audio and video capture of a computer screen, are ridiculously easy to make with free software from Microsoft--Microsoft Encoder--if you have a microphone. The Encoder wizard will teach you the rest. This weekend I tried my hand at a couple and couldn't believe the plug-n-play ease of the application. I see my summer projects lining up for next year's tutorials on Internet research, among other things. I posted a couple screencast tutorials to my website for students. One is on how to add links and images to our class blog. My students can get the tutorial when they need it and watch it as many times as they need.

The application of such technology to accommodate the myriad and sundry needs and paces of student learning will be far reaching indeed. In the blog roll I'm reading of oodles of innovations educators are developing. I invite all comers to comment on how you are using podcasts and screencasts to add to this post.

Please Stand Back

I remember when I was a grad student in England, standing on the Britrail platform in Reading, waiting for the next train back to Oxford, when an official announced the imminent arrival of a high-speed train:

"The next train arriving at Platform 2 is a high-speed train. It will not be stopping at this station. Please stand back."

What a rush to see this train arriving seemingly at first coming toward the station at a pace no different than any other until it reached the platform--blur, wind,
sound--and then it was gone in a few seconds just as beningly.

The events of this week have reminded me of that instant. I was fortunate enough to attend the Teachers Teaching Teachers 2007 Conference in Cranberry, Pennsylvania and to discover new ways to use podcasting in the classroom (more about that in future posts) and seeing the store of educational content(including audios, videos, handouts, images), available freely from iTunes. (That was the rush.) The rub is all this will have to be done at home (at least for awhile) and copied onto players and CDs since my school doesn't have iTunes software. That's the "Please Stand Back."

Right now, it's a point of discussion at my school as to how much of the information highway should be accessible. We have a filtering system designed to keep oooh content (offensive, objectionable, obscene) away from students and staff. Daily, the most frequent screenshot on my computer at my desk tends to be the filter "access denied" screen as I either try to show students to sites valuable to literary research or to my own queries in preparation for lessons(educational blogs, professorial websites, images, videos, archive.org).

Indeed, we don't want anything from cyberbullying to stalking occuring online at school not to mention elsewhere. But like dolphins in the tuna, good content is prohibited everyday from getting to teachers and students that is not only appropriate for the classroom, but free, interesting, and relevant. An addition to my afterwork hours of planning and prep. Of course, we want to protect our children from harm, but to ignore potential and necessary good that will come from technology and its instruction is also something of which I'd like not to be culpable. Preparing our students to succeed in a global economy that will have a digital infrastructure must needs begin here.

So, we are "standing back" today to ponder the best policy, we might not be going backward literally, yet to stand still can mean so. The high-speed train of technology is a blur. In the meantime, I along with colleagues and students wait for the local and work out the kinks of blogging, podcasting, and the "next." No doubt, it will take some perseverance, and courage to get on board and stay on track, but the destination is tomorrow.