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Social Networking and Social Class

Danae Boyd recently had a piece on "On the Media" about the significant differences in the social roots of My Space and Facebook, musing about whether these distinctions are being deepened. She's a researcher at Harvard's Center on Internet and Society who shares a lot of her work on her Apophenia blog. Check it out...

Kevin Kelly

For those of you interested in hearing more from Kevin Kelly, author of the "We are the Web" article we read this summer, here's a link to video of a presentation he did last year building on the theme of the article, and offering some interesting definitions of "technology."

http://www.poptech.org/popcasts/?viewcastid=37

Starting the School Year

Vicki Davis is an educational blogger (and a HS teacher!!) whom I very much respect and whose blog I read regularly. She just did a three-part series on starting the school year and I thought some of you would want to check it out, and/or flag it for re-reading in December:

http://tinyurl.com/2a9854

Podcasting Basics

Caroline called my attention to my not explaining exactly what podcasts are. A podcast is simply a digital recording, usually audio, that is turned into an "mp3" file, the format that is used by itunes, for example. Creating podcasts is quite simple. I like a tool like gabcast

http://www.gabcast.com/

where you can set up a free account and then create an mp3 file (that can be accessed on the web as a podcast) simply by calling in to an 800 number.
If you want to work with your students and have the time for them to get into production, then the free download of audacity (PC or MAC) is a great option:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Here's an audacity tutorial on "Teacher Tube":

http://tinyurl.com/27ymcq


Caroline also asked some great questions:

Is it a radio station system? How do you access them?

Many radio stations, along with National Public Radio tape their shows and make them available as podcasts that can be downloaded and listened to by anyone, whether on their computer or an a tool like an ipod. You'll get itunes on your MAC Program MAC computer, but you can also download itunes for free, for use on a PC or a MAC. You can actually subscribe to an array of podcast programs, including many NPR shows, through ITunes.

Who listens to them?

Many people, including some of the teacher bloggers you're reading, do regular podcasts as well--think of it as internet-based radio. They have their listeners who subscribe via ITunes. In the classroom, the likely listeners could be themselves (of course!!) fellow students, parents (or grandparents) and, of course, you.

I still am not quite clear about their use in the classroom either. Do I make my own? Do my students make their own or a classroom podcast?

The answer to both of these questions is yes. I strongly suggest that you think about whether having your students create little podcast/radio broadcasts might not be an exciting way to assess creatively.
Check out the podcast at this URL:

http://tinyurl.com/24j2bx

There are lots more interesting podcasts here, but Maureen Yoder has some creative ideas for the history classroom, many of which involve podcasts. I was imagining students doing podcasts of their own that borrow from one or another of these formats.

And if I make lectures available to my students via podcast, won't that make them more likely to either not pay attention in class or skip altogether?

I'm not big on this. I think that podcasts should be utilized to expand what we can do, educationally, for or with our students. We should use them (or not) on the strength of what they can do to help us teach better, and to offer ways of engaging more of our students. Trying to make and post podcasts of each day's class would be way too much work, and (I think) of mimimal utility.

What about students that may not be able to access the podcast? Doesn't this give an advantage to some students over others?

It could. Another reason not to have them required to access material crucial to the class and their grade. You can use the school lab, and files can also be downloaded to ipods, so there are possibilities, but you're right to attend to this in your thinking.
I hope that this helps....

Oh...check this out for more:

http://tinyurl.com/38ete2

Regarding Wikis, etc.

I wanted to follow up on Friday's session by pointing you towards a resource that I like a lot--Lee Lefevre's Common Craft site. Common Craft tutorial videos have a sense of humor and whimsy that I like, and he has a nice way of getting clearly and expeditiously to the basics. This link will take you to one about wikis, but he has others about RSS Feeds (a tool that will help you keep track of the activity on all of the blogs you'll want to read!) and social networking.
I also wanted to share something I just learned about. I know that you're using inspiration to do some concept mapping work, and I have the sense that some of you are seeing some neat possibilities for using the tool. You might want to check out visuwords, which is a dictionary using a graphical interface to connect words with other words and ideas. I know that it helps me to see ideas in context, even if those contexts are idiosyncratic, and this looks like the kind of tool that could inspire thinking, which I see as the ultimate criterion.

Media Specialists

Caroline blogged this week about a trip that she and a couple of others took to the school where they'll be teaching, and she wrote about meeting an inspiring media specialist. I was thinking about this as I listened to a presentation done by a woman named Joyce Valenza from the Philadelphia area (more details in a minute). Her presentation was about what she calls information fluency--helping kids to thoughtfully engage with and utilize information AND to be more sophisticated learners and creators of content. She touched on a couple of ideas that I thought might interest you. First, she speaks of a dimension that we'd not yet addressed...the idea of using blogs as sources. She presented with a teacher from her building who encouraged kids to do this, but who also wanted to scaffold their engagement with this task. They shared a template they had created for evaluating blogs, which can be found here. While you're there, I'd encourage you to have a look at what Joyce calls curricular pathfinders. These are sets of pointers to online resources organized thematically. They point to some databases that schools must subscribe to, so you'll be a bit constrained, but there's a lot that you *will* be able to see and the idea itself is a most interesting one. It also suggests a good question to add to your list of questions when you do the "tech at my school" assignment (or anytime!) Which research databases does my school subscribe to? There's lots of cool stuff being put out there, some of which costs a bit of $$, and if your library is subscribed to some of these databases you media specialist will likely only be too happy to see it being used.
Oh. The presentation that I spoke of took place at the NECC Conference in Atlanta earlier this month. I heard Joyce's presentation (and was turned on to a treasure trove of resources that she shared) here (via Apple Learning Exchange) or on itunes by subscribing to "conference Connections."

English Language and Music

Today I just want to share a couple of links that some of you might find interesting.

First off, in my recent travels I found this post that was made on a blog called "Teaching High School" that appears no longer to be active. Just a little gem you might want to use with students to remind them how challenging it is to learn English.

Secondly, Wesley Fryer is one of the more inspired educators to be blogging these days, and he's also an active podcaster. You can subscribe to his "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" podcasts on iTunes or at his blog site. He's a techie who is very conscious of the fact that we have to think of kids first, not tools, and he frequently makes reference to John Dewey, a great educational thinker who we'll be talking about at our next class (if you're curious about this man who died over 50 years ago, yet whose ideas feel amazingly "cutting edge," check out the brief, engaging essay, "My Pedagogic Creed," in the July 13th folder on CTools).
In any event, the chance to check out Wesley's own ideas is the best reason to go to his blog, but he linked to the most curious website a few days back, and I wanted to share this link as one of those "How in heck does this work..." kind of moments.
The site is called Midomi.com, and it's basically a song recognition site. You hum a tune, it tells you (with impressive accuracy) what song you're humming.
Here's Wesley's blog posting about the site. Have fun...

Bud the Teacher on Blogging

I want to steer you towards a post that you may find interesting. It starts with a post by Colorado HS teacher, Bud Hunt, who uses blogging with his English students. He himself blogs at a site called Bud the Teacher, and his work is well worth a look. The issue in this particular post seems to reside somewhere between supporting student writing as a tool for expression, and the notion of "teaching" blogging as a kind of act of connective communication and engagement with the world of ideas. The interwoven issues are nicely articulated and then, even better, several teachers respond to Bud's post (including Mr. I, whose classroom blog was one of those that we looked at) and complicate the issues still further, in lots of good ways.
This discussion fits very nicely with the conversations we started on Friday, in which some of potential benefits of blogging (being able to go deeper on a conversation, including the quieter students, slowing down the conversation) were mentioned along with concerns around privacy and that we not forget how to have good face-to-face discussions. Bud's experiences, even as a believer in the power of blogging as a tool, seem to indicate that "getting there" takes time and thought.
Here's the thread...your thoughts are welcome (whether here or on Bud's blog) Jeff

If I'm asking you...

..then I had better play, too.

I was really pleased with the discussion that grew out of your writing and drawing about technology in your classrooms. Lots of very creative ideas that, from reading some of the blog posts, set others among you to thinking. That's a great outcome, and is an auspcious beginning by my reckoning.
I also appreciated the fact that people gave expression to their skepticism, and their concerns about what might get supplanted in a rush to bring technology into our classrooms. These concerns and expressions of skepticism are vital, because (my interpretation) they help us to remember that we start with our students and our teaching/learning relationships, and we go from there. If instructional technologies can help us get there, then let's take a closer look. If not...on we go.
I'll probably mention this in class at some point, but some of you might be interested in a very creative use of blogging employed by a friend and colleague, Pete, and his student teacher from last year, Lauren. It was a kind of dialogue journal about their experiences together, and their takes on some of the issues that emerged. I found it interesting and thought-provoking to read about some of the teaching issues that emerged, particularly around gender. Maybe you'll want to try something of this kind. Check it out at:

http://ekotalearn07.blogspot.com/