RichardRadio

I’ve listened to most of the NECC conference material. But mainly I listen in the car and although I have intended to go back and blog about some of the best ones, to share with my PGCE cohort (and my new school) I haven’t got round to it yet.

Karl Fisch at The FischBowl blog has saved me some work. I will flag two sessions here with links to the audio and to Karl’s excellent notes.

Will Richardson – A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything (Audio – Karl’s Notes)

If you aren’t familiar with Podcasts or the Read/Write Web (Web 2.0) and what it means for eduacation, here would be a good place to start.

Gary Stager – Preventing Your 1 to 1 Dreams From Becoming Nightmares

(Audio – Karl’s Notes )

This was one of my favourite sessions. Unfashionably I think, Gary tells us not to get too hung up on the Internet (and the read/write web) and reminds us of Papert’s vision of the computer as the ultimate creativity machine. Get them to do things with the machine (create music, program robots, political activism) not just use it as an information terminal.

David Warlick is bemoaning the lack of best practice examples of teaching using web 2.0 tools. This strikes a chord with me (a secondary IT teacher) because I’m always looking for those killer examples that I can point members of the English or History or Science departments to, to give them a Wow moment. The “Wow” that’s great work how do we get this blog/wiki thing going. I don’t like being the lone voice in the school trying to promote these new tools, I want company

So often you find an interesting article perhaps written by a professional journalist that flags up this wonderful teacher who has used blogs / podcasts/ in the classroom. But when you actually click through to the children’s work (if there is a link), it’s not obvious what the kids are actually doing with the tools and the level of the work disappoints.

This example that David flagged up last night (via) is certainly the best example that I have seen of class writing, art work (above) and there are actually different points of views appearing in the comments of the blog posts – sounds obvious but it’s rare to see in practice.

When we flag up these examples of best practice we need to be more systematic now, we are past the stage of “hey another person used blogs in the classroom!”, we need to distinguish between primary and secondary education (secondary examples are more difficult to find), we need the age group, what kind of school is it? What is the ability level of the kids? How did we get this going? How is this integrating into the curriculum? What were the problems? And we need to focus more on the kids work rather than the educational rhetoric.

We’ve all used the vapourware technique. It’s inevitable. We have to get people and resources on board so we big things up, maybe some photos or a nice video showing kids doing interesting things with technology. Gets people exited. But now weneed to see Web 2.0 working in the classroom, we need to see the kids’ bytes on the screen.

Jon Udell: Errorless modeling

Larry works with kids who live somewhere along the continuum from Aspergers Syndrome to high-functioning autism. Effective and appropriate social performance is a major struggle for these kids. Larrys idea, which hes written up in a couple of blog posts, is that you can help them by recording awkward performances, editing out the awkwardness, and then playing back the edited versions so they can see and hear themselves performing fluently.

Jon outlines how he has used this method to improve his own public speaking. This strikes a chord for me too after editing my recent first documentary film . My own podcast performances have improved over the last couple of years – starting to teach might have something to do with it too

I would suggest a slightly different name for this technique though, modelling errorless performance seems less ambiguous to me, at least in the context. When I originally read the “Errorless Modeling” title I was expecting something about Excel.

I don’t think I would recommend Jon Udell’s work to every teacher but its amazing how often little nuggets relevent to teaching pop-up there, Screencasting being the most obvious example.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, usually in my car – I find it better than the radio. But Generally I don’t watch video online. Until now. Rocket Boom has converted me. I love it.

I’ve experimented with podcasting in Schools during my training placements. But I’ve not really had the time to get kids to develop much more than a few jingles. I think youngsters will ‘get’ the format of web video shows more readily. Audio is more intellectual, and takes longer to grab your attention. Video is so much more immediate, more exiting. Easier to get going and produce a short show that others will appreciate.

And who wouldn’t want to use the Logitech Video Effects used in the July 26th Show (see photo above) this would help get round some of the child protection issues and might even help shy kids participate.

Check out some examples of graphics made by Pov-ray an Open Source 3D graphics program. I’m still learning the GIMP so it’s all a little beyond me, but I can see that if you put a program like that in the hands of the kids they are going to be inspired.

I know I would enjoy learning it too. If someone could just get me started.

http://hof.povray.org/ Hall of fame – Example graphics

http://www.povray.org/ To Download for Windows, Mac, Linux

Gilles Tran – Artist of the photo above

Its a no brainer to have the GIMP installed on every machine in school. Whilst Photoshop is the industry standard bitmap graphics editing package (at least until this generation of kids leave school) the GIMP is the child’s choice. Why?

Forget the question of relative cost of ownership (to the school) and performance, the most important thing is that the child knows that they can go home safely install the GIMP and keep expanding their creativity outside school.

Otherwise we are tacitly saying:

1. We don’t value independent learning enough. We don’t expect you to want to use what you learned at school in your own projects at home.

2 a) You have to be rich to get ahead – non educational Photoshop licence £500; b) You have to steal software to get ahead. and c) It is safe to install cracked software on your system at home.

Furthermore by using the GIMP you are introducing the children to the Open Source software model, a collaborative, distributed and social constructivist phenonoman that is closely aligned with the values of education and a thoroughly modern concept for future generations.

If you are just thinking IT’S FREE, you are missing out on the main part of the story.