Thunder

Last week the year 5 & 6 students from Barrow CE Primary School had use of my set of ibooks, they produced comics about the planets, please visit their blog and leave comments on their work.  This morning I have popped in to say hello and to congratulate them on their work.

I have just demonstrated how to produce a podcast in Garageband so they can produce an evaluation of last weeks activities. Their first attempt can be downloaded from here.

As some of you may be aware I am in ’sunny’ Torquay at the NAACE conference, yesterday I delivered by session on web2.0 in the classroom (you can find most of the sites referred to here).

It has been great to have so much positive feedback and a little constructive negative feedback. This has left me thinking about how to improve and where I believe we should start to go next. What I believe is that it is good to see the practical uses of web2.0 in the classroom whether they be the best use or not, from the primary school blog to the geography tectonics podcast, my use of del.icio.us to the gallery of student work. Where I believe I need to take this next is to start to look in more detail about the effects on teaching and learning from using these technologies, to me it is obvious but that is not the case for everyone.

I think in Shropshire we could be at a tipping point, we have spent the last 18 months or so piloting and developing our use of these technologies but can we start to exploit them even further, using blogs to support boys writing, podcasts to support speaking and listening, del.icio.us to support research etc

I am keen to hear other peoples opinions and set up some collaborations to develop materials to support the use of these technologies in the classroom. Has anyone already developed teaching units, that don’t necessarily teach the technologies but exploit their use.

I have been working with Lea and Ollie at Thomas Adams school in Wem today, they are both geography teachers.

The purpose of the afternoon was to start to produce year 11 revision podcasts, here are there first attempts.

Tectonics.m4a and Settlements.m4a (needs iTunes or Quicktime to play)

There was lots of discussion about the following:

• Length of the podcast - how long should a podcast be, what the guys thought would be a 2 minute podcast rapidly became 4 minutes. At first they were thinking about 10 minute episodes, but in the end we believed that would be too long and we should go for short sharp shows.
• Speed of voice - a couple of times Ollie got into full stride and was rattling through his notes, at some points they speech might have been too fast. We wondered what the students would do with the podcast, if they were going to take notes then we really would need to speak at a slow pace so they could keep up.
• Images - how many images should be used? Should the track have no images at points? We didn’t really come to a consensus on this, I personally like there to be lots of images to try and keep up the pace of the show.
• Hyperlinks - it is worth adding hyperlinks from the enhanced podcast to point to written notes to support the audio. We felt that this would be the next step in out journey, for now we would just put up the podcast.
• Student podcasts - after certain topics of work this year they will get students to produce a podcast as an assessment activity - these podcasts could start to form a set of revision notes for other students.

It would be nice to hear other peoples thoughts on the discussion points above. If you have time it would be great if you could leave a note about their podcasts on their Geograhy blog at http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk

UPDATE: Lea has now reproduced his Tectonics podcast and has uploaded it to his blog (http://adamsgeog.ethink.org.uk) - I think he has a talent for it, what do you reckon?

Today I have been working with a group of year 7, 8 & 9 students from Sundorne school. The group planned/scripted their podcast for the first hour of the day and then went off to interview staff and students, they used the internal mics on the apple laptops, irivers and a usb mic. After recording the necessary audio they edited the clips within Garageband and obtained appropriate images to enhance the podcast.

• What have you learnt today?
• Was it an enjoyable experience, would you do it again?
• How could a podcast be used by the school?
• What would you like to be on the schools monthly podcast?

This morning I was in Oldbury Wells School in Bridgnorth, Shropshire working with a group of MFL students in year 9.

8 of the students were studying Spanish and the rest of the group were French students. The students studying Spanish were new to the topic so they produced a Spanish Alphabet podcast and an interview with a famous person/celebrity. The students studying French had been working on health etc in their recent lessons so they produced podcasts based around healthy eating, lifestyles etc.

Prior to the session the students had produced their scripts, that they later copied into the lyrics tab (within itunes), this meant that we were able to get straight on with recording their vocals and adding in sounds, then later in the morning appropriate images. It was the first time the majority of the students had used an Apple Mac but had no problems using Garageband. Flickr was used to find copyright free images for use within their podcasts.

As with all these podcasting days I had a great time and the students all seemed to enjoy what they were doing. The deputy head teacher is now thinking about what next, producing podcasts with year 11 students for revision and purchasing a set of MacBook’s for the school. The MFL teachers that worked with me throughout the morning were really impressed by the language questions the students were asking and their motivation throughout, they didn’t stop and go for break

Here is one example (m4a, mp3) the rest can be downloaded and listened/viewed here.

Listen to the podcast produced on the bus on the way back from BETT07, I would recommend the m4a file so you can watch the video.

BETT07 - m4a (view in iTunes or Quicktime)
BETT07 - mp3

I hope you enjoy it, I will get around to writing a serious post about BETT soon.

Atomic Learning are giving BETT attendees free access to Atomic Learning and the workshops within the site.  Some of the many workshops highlight blogger and itunes on both Mac and PC:

1.      Go to www.atomiclearning.co.uk
2.      Enter the following user name and password:
Username: BETT07
Password:  atomic

Blogging &  Podcasting/Vodcasting

The username and password is valid until 12/2/07

The blogging workshops covers mainly the use of ‘Blogger’ so is somewhat limited, in the earlier workshops they do mention other sites that could be used for blogging, from paid for sites to host your own solutions.

The podcasting workshops cover Garageband for the Mac and Audacity for Windows.

My latest podcasting adventure was at Priory school in Shrewsbury.  Trina invited me in to work with a group of 20 Y10 students, prior to my visit she had worked with them to produce their scripts - this was done in Google Docs, and example of a script can be viewed here.  As the students were working in groups the use of google docs to produce their scripts was ideal, all of the group could participate in producing the final script.

The podcasts were produced in Garageband, the final podcasts can be viewed/listened to below:

Alex, Nick & Absar (mp3 or m4a)
cfrd (mp3 or m4a)
Condoms (mp3 or m4a)
Hott Pink! (mp3 or m4a)
Matts Music (mp3)
Mindless Chatter, Pointless Talk (mp3)

The deputy headteacher was really impressed by the work that the students produced and the learning environment within the class, several of the students have asked if the school can buy Apple computers.

Apple have now got me thinking that maybe I should part with some of my hard earned cash and purchase a new iPod.  Since they were realised I have convinced myself that i didn’t need one, I have an iRiver that I use to listen to and record on, so why would I need what I thought of was an expensive mp3 player.

But, now that you can play games on your iPod they have more of an appeal to me.  Time to go away and think - maybe an early Christmas present ;)  It might also help me to keep up to date with the podcasts I keep downloading and then don’t have time to watch/listen to.

Via the ICT Research Network I was pointed to the Frank Wise School blog that contained a section on their reflections on podcasting with children with severe learning difficulties.  By all accounts it appears to have been a huge success.