Archive for April, 2007

A Podcast Review

April 24, 2007 at 1:31 am · Filed under podcasting

I found a great educational podcasting site at Education Podcasting Network. This site is a compilation of podcasts subscribed to and contributed to by educators dedicated to using technology. I listened to a podcast by James Basore, a Senior Instructional Designer at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, California. Mr. Basore has just recently begun podcasting.  He is creating a podcast diary of setting up Moodle. He has found that the online discussion community has been a tremendous help with his Moodle self-education.

Mr. Basore goes on to describe his endeavors to setup a video lecture hall on a limited budget in which speakers can present and record their lectures both as podcasts and as videos as easily as if they were using PowerPoint, etc. He plans to broadcast further podcasts to the community at large and to call upon the online discussion community to help with the development of this new lab at Golden Gate.  Mr. Basore’s podcast is a great example of how to use social network at all levels of education.

In researching this posting further, I found some other obvious uses for podcasting in education. ESL educators are embracing podcasting with open arms. They can use podcasts to prepare lessons for students in advance to address their individual needs. As most educators know, English as a Second Language classrooms often have students that speak a variety of languages. A teacher can create lessons in several languages or modify an English lesson for each student and podcast it for delivery at school or at home. An excellent site for reviewing podcasting in the ESL classroom is compiled at the ESL Podcasting Project Information.

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Faith in the American Spirit

April 22, 2007 at 8:35 pm · Filed under Educational Philosophy

Using Technology to Address StudentsI know that my blogs are often negative about the direction that education is headed in America due to “No Child Left Behind” and the over-emphasis of standardized testing.  However, I am also hopeful that the pendulum will turn and educators will get back to the business of educating.  I believe the answer to reaching our students is to address their learning styles through computers and technology.  I have great faith in the American spirit as long as we keep our freedom to make choices.

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Stupid in America video

April 22, 2007 at 8:07 pm · Filed under Educational Philosophy

Are the students getting stupider in America?  My husband is a professor of chemistry.  Over the past four years, the averages on his test have gone down markedly.  The only common thread that he can find is “No Child Left Behind” and the over-emphasis on standardized testing.  Please view the following video to see what you think.    .

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G-Cast podcasting example

April 22, 2007 at 4:16 pm · Filed under podcasting

Check this site out to hear my podcast from G-Cast audio.

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Is keyboarding a dead skill

April 22, 2007 at 3:08 pm · Filed under Technology Learning

KeyboardOur school is constantly trying to find ways to cut costs. We are planning two new middle schools that should be occupied by Fall 2008. We have gravitated from desktops to laptops on carts. As anyone trained on a keyboarder will tell you, laptops are not easy to type on. Further, the arms are in an uncomfortable position and usually at table height rather than four to six inches lower than a table. When our IT team got together to discuss this problem, we were told that laptops will at some point in the future be replaced by hand-held computers that the students will text-message on. Now I know that I may be a little old-fashioned, but I visual the future generation of carpal tunnel sufferers. My question is this, can we or should be totally eliminate a keyboard attached to a computer??

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Adding a caricature

April 22, 2007 at 2:36 pm · Filed under Blogs

Vicki

I’m experimenting with adding a caricature of myself.  I’ve found it quite simple to add images to WordPress.com using HTML.  It will be interesting to see what the students can do with the tools available to enhance their blogs.  I’ve heard from other teachers that the students have acquired a great deal of knowledge from their “My Space” websites and other social networking sites.  Learning to create a blog has been an enjoyable experience that will find it’s way into my teaching.

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Using Wikispace.com, Gliffy.com and TeacherTube.com in the Classroom

April 21, 2007 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Required Paper

This writing will review three online social networking tools and their use in the classroom. Each year, schools spend tens of thousands of dollars on software for student use in producing, editing, and displaying their work. Although the use of the Internet can create safety problems, the educational community is finding ways to secure online tools and offer the students the best of social networking to produce and share their work without great cost to the school district. Furthermore, the district IT department no longer has to contend with timely and costly updates. These tasks are performed by the online service.

The first program that will be reviewed in this writing is Wikispaces.com. What is a wiki? Wikipedia.org defines a wiki as “…a website that allows visitors to add, remove, edit and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages.” The most obvious use of a wiki in the classroom is as a tool for student group collaboration and authoring of documents. The teacher presents an assignment to which the students contribute, edit, and publish the information as it pertains to the assigned task. The students learn to: publish content; use collaborative skills; negotiate with others on correctness, meaning and relevance; and (in some cases) to teach each other. Using a wiki, the students must learn to support their ideas and justify them to the group and the audience at large. These are skills that the student can take into further educational settings and the workplace.

Online security is always a concern for educators both legally (COPA, CIPA, and TEACH) and ethically. Wikispace.com has a service that allows the educator a secure site in which the users must be invited to join the teacher’s wiki. This is an attractive plus for using Wikispace.com as it narrows the possibility of inappropriate content being posted to the students’ wikis. (Check this site out for an example of a classroom wiki chosen by Wikispace.com as the Wikispace of the month).

Another tool that can be used as an educational enhancement to the curriculum and student learning is Gliffy.com. Most educators have used a diagramming program such as Inspiration in the school setting to assign student work such as outlining, diagramming, and creating webs of ideas and concepts. Gliffy.com is an application that lets you share these student-generated works for free over the web. Gliffy.com online information states the following: “Since Gliffy Online runs in your web browser, there is no need to download any additional software to use it. By leveraging new web technologies, Gliffy Online brings you a familiar desktop application feel in a web browser.”

A problem that teachers and students often run into when using software on site is that the student does not have access to the software at home on his/her own computer and therefore is limited to using the program at school. This is a detriment to adding the diagramming and outlining as homework and in some cases does not address the needs of learners with special needs. With Gliffy.com, the student can produce and submit his or her work from any computer with Internet access. (Check this site out for an example of a Gliffy diagram).

An additional feature that Gliffy.com adds is a tie-in to Yahoo images. The student can do a quick image search and add the picture into his/her document. The student can use actual images that apply to the topic that he or she is diagramming, outlining, or webbing to enhance the presentation and clarify the text. Clearly, Gliffy.com can add a fun, educational, and creative enrichment to the student learning experience.

TeacherTube.com is the final tool that is examined in this writing. TeacherTube.com describes its goals as “…to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.” While YouTube.com provides a venue to upload and show videos, it is not censured in most cases for inappropriate videos. TeacherTube.com is designed for educators to present appropriate educational videos.

TeacherTube.com can serve to fill a gap in the educational setting. If a district subscribes to online video services such as Unitedstreaming, the teacher of such disciplines as Language Arts usually finds that there is little content in the videos offered that pertains to his/her content area. TeacherTube.com can be used to share information, lesson plans, teacher-created content videos, student-created content videos, and other pertinent information in video format to augment the curriculum.

Videos on this site can be made public or private. This service offers the educator the ability to secure a site that can be accessed by invitation only. Another nice feature of this site is that it allows the site members to make “…constructive comments and use the rating system to show appreciation for videos of value….” Users also have the ability to flag inappropriate sites that are then moderated by the TeacherTube.com staff. (Check TeacherTube.com for examples of teacher and student generated videos.)

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Misuse of Social Networking

April 17, 2007 at 12:46 am · Filed under Social Networking

As most people have heard today, a terrible tragedy happened at Virginia Tech University. As of this writing, 33 people are known dead and 17 injured in two separate shooting incidences on campus. The reason that I feel this incident applies to our digital media class is that the university used e-mails, i messaging, and the school’s website to warn the community about the first shooting while the second shooting was occurring. The president of the university even threw out the term “social networking” to describe how they went about informing the university community about the shooting. Leave it to the “professional” administrator to know every “buzz word” out there to pollute the issue. They tried to use the Internet instead of putting up baricades to block off roads going into campus. From the news conference that I watched on my T.V., it appears that they wanted to keep the first shooting an isolated incident and sweep it under the rug, even though the suspect was not in custody. Yikes!!

It’s clear that the campus administration was trying in every way possible to cover their backsides. I can just imagine the meeting that took place to decide how to inform the university community. Their first concern was the image of the university as a “SAFE” place. They didn’t want a mass exodus of students and a loss of tuition. I’m sick to death of administrators referring to the “business model” of education. The only business we have at any level of education is to “EDUCATE” NOT negotiate. Students aren’t our customers–that’s too impersonal. We are not selling them learning. Trying to package learning as a fun package is misleading. Learning is not always fun, having learned is fun. Education should be a pure endeavor without the dollar being the bottom line. Yes, it takes money to provide an educational setting, but in our free society, education should be taken for granted not granted if you pay the most money.

Ah…dear reader, but I digress. If my son or daughter attended that university, I would pull them out quicker than you could say “social networking.” I wouldn’t want my child’s education or his/her life to be based on the “business model” of education. I’d want his safety to be the first concern of one and all within the university administration. And, PLEASE don’t hide behind the buzz word “social networking.” I’m appalled.

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Photo Sharing

April 13, 2007 at 9:04 pm · Filed under Photo Sharing

With the Read/Write Web, there are a growing number of ways to publish photos.  There are many sites that offer free hosting for photos that can be shared with others.  Yahoo purchased Flickr.com, a Web-based digital photography portal, that is much more than just a photo publishing space.  Will Richardson writes in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, “It’s [Flickr.com] true social software where the contributors interact and share and learn from each other in creative and interesting ways… (p. 101)” with interesting educational potential.  Flickr makes it easy to send images from Flickr to an aggregator, Weblog, or Webpage.

Richardson further writes that one of the “…most useful tools in Flickr is the annotation feature, which allows you to add notes to parts of the image simply by dragging a box across an area and typing text into a form (p. 103). ”  This feature can be used by students to create photos and label them to model concepts and ideas in assigned projects.  Because of Fair Use laws, the teacher and students can use copyrighted images as well for educational purposes as long as they cite the source of the materials being used.

A teacher or student can create a discussion group around an image.  This can be done “…via the RSS feed that Flickr creates for your ‘Recent Comments’ (p. 105).” Flickr can connect people from around the world.  This is done by the use of tags or keywords that are searchable on Flickr.

Flickr provides the ability to create albums (sets of pictures).  The individual can also easily create slide shows using Flickr.  Both the album and the slide show allow students to create their own personalized collection of photos, annotate them, and create discussion groups around the pictures.

Check this site out for ideas on using photo sharing and the digital camera in the classroom.

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Considering “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” by Jeff Howe

April 13, 2007 at 8:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

In reading “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” I’m struck by the power of the Internet to abliterate someone’s career in the case of photographer, Mark Harmel.  We are living in a fast changing world where jobs are being outsourced.  Are we creating as many jobs as we’re eliminating?  It is clear that our economy is a global economy as many of the jobs are being outsourced to individuals in other countries.  By using technology, a company doesn’t even have to rent a building or create an office space.  They can outsource the job to someone working at home on a computer in India or China.

Photography, video, and audio materials that used to demand an expert to create them for a high price can now be easily obtained from amateurs.  While it’s a great source for individuals to share, it’s a nightmare for those who have had their career’s turned upside down. 

The author doesn’t try to answer the question of right or wrong in the case of crowdsourcing.  It is just food for thought and contemplation.  How will social networking affect future career choices?  It is abundantly clear that we as educators must prepare our students for the ever changing technological market place for which their future jobs will depend.

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