Betty’s Bytes

Twittering, podcasting, blogging, posting, reading, researching, keeping up with the news and sports, finding and communicating with friends, making new friends, buying and selling, comparing, writing, mashing, googling, binging, banking, investing, learning, sharing…. While reading my tweets today, I was reminded how much is available to us through technology. Take a few minutes to view a few of these links:

• Videos for using SMART boards in the classroom
• Videoconferencing to bring the world to students
• Marco Torres engaging students through digital media
• Essential tools for collaboration with students
• Teach literacy across the curriculum, fast and free
• Visual Bloom’s with 21st Century tools
• 15 things all classrooms should have
• Top 100 tools for learning by category
• 50 best inventions of 2009 – Time
• 24 things to do when launching a  new blog
• 60 second recap – 60 seconds to learn about a book or contribute a recap of your own
• 10 Gadgets to make Google Wave more productive and fun
• Google Wave reading list
• Students speak their minds through digital media

Do not let the word “podcasting” be intimidating. Podcasting can be as simple as recording a daily lesson as it is presented and posting it somewhere for others to access; how nice would that be for a student who missed a lecture or explanation of an assignment or theory! There is little work at all on the part of the teacher — and how appealing is that?

Podcasting has been a topic of Betty’s Bytes on several occasions; click here to read some of the previous posts. ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education) has recently published a new book on podcasting Educator’s Podcast Guide, which can be ordered; but, I do have Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms available for checkout. There are many articles online to assist you in preparing for podcasting; ones from educational sites such as this one from THE Journal will be the most beneficial.

In our school, the library has a room with a computer that will provide a quiet place for recording; so while some students are working on preparing for their podcasts, others can be recording and editing. Students take ownership of the products that they create, so you will find that students do much more analyzing, editing, and revising that they have ever done with the written assignment; you will want to allow extra time for this process.

Integrating technology in a classroom can be a daunting task. As teachers begin to learn new technology, that technology will spill over into the classroom; but, beware of the pitfalls. The more we know as teachers before the project begins, the better the outcome will be; sometimes there is no way to know exactly what problems will occur, but you can guarantee that there will be some. While reading 3 Challenges to Wiki Use in Instruction by Ruth Reynard, I was reminded of some of the problems that we had podcasting in the Senior English classes earlier this year even though we had practiced our plans before presenting them to students. One example of the types of challenges that occur during an online project happened because the students chose to use a different format for media files that the ones we had used during our preparation; we had opted to save and upload using wav format, where the students chose mp3. As a result, we had to locate and install a file that would allow them to use their selected format; it was not a bad thing, just an unexpected, time-consuming one.

As with a PowerPointPresentation or any other project, the more work that is done in preparation for the project, the more likely that it will be successful. The first time I did a PowerPoint lesson with a group of students, I found that they were more interested in the features and fun parts of the software than with the subject of the lesson; we require our students to research and enter the “meat and potatoes” of the objective into their slides, then they are allowed to be creative with all the “bells and whistles.”

Editing becomes second nature to students using technology, and their desires to revise and edit seem to come from within. In the past students would research, write, and submit. Now we are seeing students research, write, edit and revise, then submit. More and more we are seeing students editing and revising repeatedly in order to produce a product, which they can be proud to display and share electronically with their classmates, their teachers, or the world.

Finally, when using technology to engage your students or enhance your lessons, require that your students be active participants. Share your rubric, so that students have a complete understanding of what is required for mastery and provide them with rewards for going the step beyond, synthesizing and utilizing what they have learned and shared. When using blogs and wikis, your students must actively participate in discussions and collaborations. You may find that as students are more actively engaged, they are reading more and synthesizing what they have read projecting this newly acquired knowledge into their online contributions.

Obviously, time is a factor; but it is important for students to have time to process information and formulate their responses and contributions. I am again offering my services to the teachers in our school to help integrate technology to engage your students in active learning.

Students in two senior English classes have just completed a unit by writing, recording, editing, and posting podcasts of interviews. What an exciting adventure in both classes! The students were so engaged that they did not realize how hard they were working, while they recorded, added music, edited, and posted their podcasts. View their submissions by visiting the blog created for that purpose VBCA Student. The students reviewed an interest survey and selected either a famous British politician or scientist to research, or a nonfiction book to read.  Once the students made their selections, they brainstormed questions to answer via their research and then used reference books and online journals to research, write, and report orally on their choices.  These reports took the form of an interview in which students made connections between modern world issues (political, environmental, or economical) and made inferences based on their research as to how their subject would respond to such questions.  The interviews were then recorded as podcasts and posted to a blog where students were able to listen to one another’s final products.  (English Virginia Standards of Learning covered included E 12.2.1, E 12.2.2, E 12.2.3, E 12.2.4, E 12.2.5, E 12.2.6, E 12.12.1, E 12.12.2, E 12.12.3, E 12.12.4, E 12.12.5, E 12.12.6, E 12.12.7, E 12.12.8, E 12.12.9, E 12.12.10, E 12.16.3, E 12.16.4, E 12.16.5, E 12.16.6, E 12.16.7, E 12.16.8, E 12.16.9, E 12.16.10, E 12.16.11, E 12.16.12 along with a variety of Technology Proficiencies.)

As teachers, we prepared for the first podcasting experience in our small alternative high school by taking classes, collaborating with expert users, reading Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, and researching the Web. The students wrote, rewrote, and practiced their scripts. Then, we used the free downloadable program Audacity to record the interviews for podcasting.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that we as educators learned was that the students were self-directed, involved, cooperative, and collaborative because they were truly engaged in the learning activity. It was a joy to see students revise, re-record, and edit because they wanted to do so, not because it was a requirement.

As the Internet continues to expand exponentially and the school division demands more and more from us as educators to engage our students using technology, time becomes a more cherished gift. Can you research, interact, and blog too much? Do you spend too much time on myspace, Facebook, Twitter, or some other social site? Do you find it difficult to try to read just the sites that you have tagged for their interests? Is your mailbox filled to overflowing with interesting information? Do you have to keep a list of your blogs, your logins, and your passwords just to remember what you have agreed to maintain?

All of these questions came to mind this morning, as I logged onto the computer to update my personal blog and realized that I have too many blogs to maintain.  This blog Betty’s Bytes is important as it provides a venue for me to share some of the ordinary and extraordinary things that I learn with my co-workers and friends in education. My personal blog is my journal and vital to sharing my life with my family and a few close friends. Through the years I have created several technology in education blogs, and for some reason I am reluctant to delete them even though I do not use them any longer — they seem somehow to mark an historical trail of how I got to where I am today. I have also created a blog for my son’s friends, who were traveling the world with the musician Jack Johnson as his nannies, a blog for my high school class after a mini reunion in Rockbridge County, and a variety of VBCA CRS blogs, wikis, and podcasting sites such as the VBCA Student for podcasting and Do You Believe in Me for publishing student writings. All of the sites that I use are free except for one personal domain that I use for personal links and email. Now, I am blogging on yet another free site, the one provided by the school division for us to use for instruction; my site is Technology & the alternative student, a reflection on what I am doing at work.

I have too many blog and wiki sites, so my next job is to evaluate what is really important, what I must keep and maintain, what I must keep for historical purposes, and what must be deleted. The time has come where teachers will create and maintain their own blogs, so there is no need for me to have quite so many — although, as I reflect on what this is all about, I am reminded that I must maintain a blog and a wiki for training purposes, as well — so there are two more sites that I cannot delete just yet.