RichardRadio

The Connect Learning Podcast, with David Warlick had an interview with Bob Sprankle a teacher who blogs and podcasts with his class at the Room 208 Blog

The week starts for Bob’s class with a production meeting to see what is going in this weeks podcast. Students then work towards producing their bit. The kids love it and can’t wait to come to school. Bullet.

There is a quick textual resume of the interview on David’s blog.

For the podcast :
Connect Learning, with David Warlick » Blog Archive » Episode 27 — An Interview with Bob Sprankle

PS. (To my English ears David W sound like fellow podcaster Wichita Rutherford)

Video is inspiring and fills me with trepidation. Could I ever produce, or get students to produce, anything like this? I will try to find out more about the methods they use. The only thing I could find on this site was this process guide.

In Episode I check out “Think Different” and other films outlining the values of the school.
In Episode VI check out individually directed films. I liked “The bathtub driver” which appears to be an animated version of a book.

[snipet from the site]
iCan is a short film festival produced by students from San Fernando, CA, USA. The movies are projects for school assignments as well as projects for community building. Digital storytelling is our way of promoting the arts, celebrating our culture, and improving our communications with you: the world. We hope you enjoy our efforts. Thank you from the San Fernando Education Technology Team (SFETT).

SFETT Presents I Can www.sfett.com

In Sheffield schools I saw plenty of death by powerpoint, of machine operator type training (and thinking). There is no doubt that technology is not being used properly. Its easy to chuck money at the problem and buy computers. Its much less easy to use them properly.

This book looks as though it outlines the potential problems of the technology approach. Which is a useful exercise. I wonder if it has anything positive to add?

The Flickering Mind: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved
From Amazon.com
Also available at amazon.co.uk but there are no reviews this side of the Atlantic

Woah, my tutors are really going to hate me, I am going to give them a hard time armed with this stuff from the NECC conference in the US. William Lynch is the head of the School of Eduacation at Drexel University. They have decided to give all incoming Education students iPods.

Check out the following bits:

[my transposition]

…On Challenging the faculty

[6.25] We want to stimulate the students, to ask the faculty for help, to engage the faculty to challange them… to say I’ve got this idea, is there anything in the literature that says that this idea would work in principle? is it a good learning strategy? Is there anything that you have experienced in related technologies that says to us that would be a good application… but its on the edge its a place that we haven’t been before. Is there anything about the kids that we work with either in urban, surburban or rural settings, [7.00]that this technology might address one of the problems that they have, one of the challenges that they encounter on a day to day basis in terms of learning.

So its that notion, that level of engagement, that goes beyond training people to meet school system requirements, to teach the curriculum in the classroom, to think beyond that,to think at a level that says how can I be something more than I’m expected to be.

Thats what we are trying to engage our students in.

And, we are using technology as a vehicle to get there because we think thats this is the last great frontier where we can really make a difference.[7.40]

——————

…On bringing teacher’s in-school experience back into the school of education by podcasting [he calls it plogging but thats unnecessary creation of a new term in my opinion]
[9.00 - 10.00]

…On the school of education becoming a creative lab.
[14.40 - 16.30]

I was trying to link to each part of the podcast using Jon Udell’s Soundbite technique but it seems I have to run a script on my server to pull the original file then only send out the snippet to the user. I’ll try to work out how to do that another day.

For the full podcast see the following link:
2005 NECC Podcast: William Lynch

Since I tried to use podcasting in an after school club called Brad FM at a local school, I’ve been looking out for teachers who are using blogs and podcasts. It hasn’t been easy but I recently found Brett simplying by by typing “education” into iTunes. He hasn’t actually named his podcast yet but the blog is called EDTech OZ.

I’m sure there are hundreds of of teachers out there that are using blogs and podcasts, but this is the first I’ve mananged to find. Here you can follow his experiment. podcast 7 is a good place to start. Its a primary class – Year 7 and they are trying to produce an audio show.

Interesting points:

• Brett is the editor in chief of the whole show. They have shared out the various roles of presenters, audio engineers, researchers, copy editors etc.
• The students perceive that other students throughout the school will hear their work – so they think of it more as a school play or a performance rather than a class room exercise
• Because of the audience aspect they are much more critical in their choice of language. They gone beyond simply copying plagerised material off wikipedia and started re-writing

Aged 12 these kids are quite a couple of years younger than my BradFM crew, so its natural that they have more structure. But listening to this podcast, I realise now that perhaps I was being over ambitious in trying to get my 14 year olds to completely write, produce, perform and engineer their own shows. Still, that is the nature of the podcasting medium: anyone has a voice. I am looking forward to listening to episodes 8 & 9 of Brett’s show to see what they produce. Will it be too scripted and feel stilted? Whatever the outcome, this is where its happening. This is where real study and research is taking place – in the classroom. Go Brett!

EDTech OZ With Brett Moller » Podcast Episode 7

Brett’s class are also using a Class Blog to talk about imigration issues raised by their reading the book “Boy Overboard” by Morris Gleitzmen

Year 7 Book Study (Intro Post)

I don’t even like the word teach or teacher.

In Spanish it would be Profesor or Maestro which doesn’t have the same conotations of I know and I will tell you what you need to know. At least if you stand up in front of a class and profess it doesn’t sound so arrogant. In fact you could be a bit batty most professors are, charming. And Maestro? sounds like you have effortless command of your subject without implying any dictatorial methods of imparting knowledge.

Or am I getting too pedantic?

I think I just never liked teachers

A month ago I went down to Brighton and spent the day looking for flat shares on notice boards and in news papers. No joy.

A couple of weeks ago, I found out about Brighton University NetLet website where you can find flats but most importantly, post messages to find potential flatmates. Within a few days I was down in Brighton again where I met up with 3 others to see a house that we took. Simple. And I even picked up Mark in Nottingham and bored him sensless about blogs and playing him podcasts for 8 hours on the motorway. Little did he know when he got into the car at 7.00am Hehehe!

I can even see the sea from my room (just).

Come and visit! here we are

Update: 29 Aug 05

Mark sent me a picture of the house with Lindsay and Me

Seems like getting schools to link with foreign counterparts is a silver bullet. Improved citizenship and motivation they say – for both pupils and staff. There is a surprisingly excellent UK govt site that provides a match making message board along with plenty of well writen articles on how to inititate a link and then gives you ideas on what kind of activities can be done. The BBC and the British Council are also heavily involved.

www.globalgateway.org UK Govt. Dept. for Education & Skills
www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass I enjoyed the Radio 5 Live audio

Any way it seems that the first thing that happens is that the teachers go on holiday/ make a cultural visit to the country in question. Months, if not years later maybe some kids get to go. If this improves the motivation of teachers, I’m all for it.

And from the otherside of the fence… When I was at school, we had a French exchange program and it was great! Perhaps 25 pupils from different age groups jumped on a bus and went down to Normandy for 10 days to stay with our pen pals . We went to school with them, we went on trips, we messed about and certainly improved our French. I hope the teachers enjoyed it too.

Nowadays with falling flight prices schools are being more adventurous, Africa is popular. I guess the fact that we share similar time zones helps, making real time communications easier, and what an incentive to use all these new communication tools, email, Skype, Video conferencing. Schools are actually trying to do development work collaborating with poorer schools.

Ok, its a hell of a lot of work to initiate or even maintain school linkages, a lot of it unpaid, but it must be worth it. I’m a fan of travelling as part of a cultural exchange and that means going with a group – a lot more fun than going with the family.

Also see previous postlet : Skype for Schools

We are in this transition phase of history, moving from an industrial age to an information age. Information technology is the biggest news out there, its the most interesting and amazing thing impacting the globe at this moment in time. The only contender would be biotech. Biotech might save or destroy our lives, it may transform our species but we don’t proactively deal with it everyday like we do with the Internet, the cellphone or the cash machine.

I’ve worked most on the strategic use of technology but more recently on implementing it (swimming against the tide again!). But now I find I am more interested in the applications of information and information technology on the human mind and soceity. Thats why I’m going into teaching – that and the holidays.

Oh! this is the bit when I have to say that I have a life long ambition to work with kids? Well they can be fun, they can be painful. My theory, untested on anything but a tiny scale, is that if you can talk to them in a language that they understand and help them do what they want to do it can be rewarding. But basically they are just lab rats in my plan for world domination Hehehe.

I’m really buzzin about starting my training in September – and about going to Brighton