Podcasts From Last Semester

The first podcast I listened to was entitled Watchers and Listeners - How Do We Respond? I thought this was a good podcast. Although one of the speakers did not seem to be as prepared as the other two. There were lots of awkward pauses and seemed a little lacking in content knowledge.



I liked how all of the speakers interacted. Everyone seemed to speak clearly and for the most part stay on topic. What I am going to take from this podcast is to make sure to "do my homework" and make sure that I have clear and precise notes to ensure that I do not get off topic. I can imagine that it may difficult when feeding off of one another to remain focused on what the podcast is to be on.

The second podcast I listen to was What I Learned From Randy Pausch's Last Lecture I felt that this podcast was much more organized. It seemed to me that the speakers of this podcast were much more into the topic. There were only a couple awkward pauses, which I believe is to be expected. Also, this group used more humor that the initial group I listened to.



After watching Randy's last lecture I can understand why the speakers were so enthralled with the topic. Randy was a wonderful speaker and I believe he would excite whomever his audience was. So, an improvement that I will keep in mind will be to make sure that the topic of discussion will be one that touches me or that I feel strongly about. Following is the video of Randy Pausch's last lecture. Please take the time to watch.

180 Day?

Out of the "Best(?) of the Fishbowl" the blog that I chose to talk about was from the month of April entitled 180 Days? . The reason why I chose this one is because I have often wondered myself "Where do all of the days go?" Barry Bachenheimer is a professor that used the Did You Know?/Shift Happens videos to provoke conversation in his class.

These discussions later caused Mr. Bachenheimer to raise this question himself. Which, naturally lead him to create a video of his own entitled 180 Days? . Following is the video:



Mr. Fisch thought it was a great idea so he borrowed Bachenheimer's to assist in creating his own for his school. If you follow this link and scroll down to the fourth paragraph you will be able to see Mr. Fisch's version. Overall the message is the same. There are a ton of school days that are wasted on all sorts of non-educational materials. So. does that make those days any less important or should we re-evaluate our thought process? Perhaps make some adjustments?

I think that both of these men are on to something here. I know that this is very controversial but, why not? Why not have year round school??? The whole reason we have summers to begin with is so that the children could come home and help in the fields and with the livestock. How many of us are still doing that? There are schools here in the US that are year round already! According to the American Library Association : "Over the past fifteen years there has been a 544 percent increase in the number of public schools that have implemented year-round education in the United States."

As I said this is a very controversial topic of discussion. This is a wonderful site to help explain the various tracking schedules involved with year-round school. This site also list the pros and cons of both. If you have never thought of this before this would be a wonderful place to get just your basic info on the subject.

I personally believe that we should go to year-round school. Don't get me wrong I love my summers, but it is the year 2009. When are we going to adjust ourselves to fit in with the rest of the world? The track schedules give us ample amount of time off. No, it is not all in one big chunk. But, the kids are not the only ones who "forget" information learned from the previous year - the teachers do too.

Technologically illterate?

I thought this was a great post by Mr. Fisch. I have become somewhat of a fan of his since the first Fischbowl assignment. He makes some very truthful statements that I believe are often overlooked. Seems to me that there are still a ton of folks (mostly in admin positions) that are afraid of "the computer." Why? I'm not really sure. I think part of that problem is because there is never enough tech support. I can count on one of my hands the amount of teacher inservices that I have attended that had ANYTHING to do with technology.

It is strange for us to know and seem technology being used in so many of our everyday activities, yet when it comes to the classroom we want so much of it to be almost prehistoric. Now, I can only base my opinions off of what I have experienced and I have not taught in Mobile County in over 7 years so some of this may have changes - at least I hope so. At any rate, when I was teaching here I had no computers in my class, there were no computer classes offered to my students, I was required to have the old paper gradebook and there was still a card catalog being USED in the library. I also have to mention that this was a low socio-economic school.

Now, when I taught school in Georgia it was a huge step up in the technology department. We had an overhead projector that was shared among grade level. Of course, we had to purchase our own overhead materials and those are not cheap! We did have a tv in each classroom and we were each allotted 3 computers to every classroom. Best of all - no card catalog in the library. I thought I had died and gone to heaven!!! A funny yet relevant point to be made was when I gave a power point presentation to my fellow educators on our new text book adoption. You would have thought I was a genius! The amount of teachers in that meeting that had no idea how to uses power point, much less use any key board short cuts, was absolutely embarrassing. After that I was the teacher the other teachers would come to if they had problems with their computer. Ha! As if I knew what I was doing! Apparently I knew more than them.

My overseas teaching experience was a complete 180 from my teaching in Mobile. The International school of Belgrade had the funds to support their staff in technology. We had a full time tech person on staff. We each had out very own computer plus 10 computers in each room. There was a massive computer lab because every class had computer class twice a week. Every teacher had their own overhead and were given more overhead materials than what we knew what to do with. Yes this was a private school and yes the parents forked out a lot of money to send their students there. But, the money given to the school was allocated properly. Technology was a huge part of the curriculum at every grade level. It was a priority.

I guess my overall point is that I agree with Mr. Fisch. If we are to be proper educators we owe it to our future to be properly schooled in technology. It's not going anywhere and if we are not on the boat we are going to be left behind. I feel that we are already behind enough and it is about time to do some catching up with the rest of the world.

Podcasts

Podcasts are new to me and honestly it made me feel old and out of date when I was trying to navigate around the itunes website. I stuck it through and managed to figure it out though! So as you can imagine, this particular assignment has truly opened my eyes to an entirely different way to teach and learn not only in the classroom but also as continuing ed.

The first podcast I listened to was SmartBoard Lessons. I listen to a few of the episodes to get a better idea of how this works and also trying to figure out if it would be useful to me as an educator. After listening to a few I saw how addictive podcasting can be. The SmartBoard Lessons podcast had sponsorships and seemed to be one that has been around for sometime. I thought it was wonderful that you could connect to folks from all over the world. This podcast also had music playing in the opening of the cast which I thought was a nice touch. There was also a great deal of advertisement in this podcast.

KidCast by Dan Schmit was very different from the SmartBoard Lessons podcast. This podcast had no opening music and was only one guy talking. Although it seemed more boring than the first podcast I actually got some great ideas from him. I felt he did a much better job explaining how to use podcast in the classroom. The title of the episode I listen to was "Medium is not the message." He referred to using podcasts in the classroom as "extended academic conversation." Overall this podcast seemed to be the one that was the most boring to listen to even though I got the best information for this one.

EdTechtalk was similar to the first podcast that I listen to in the fact that they were speaking from all over the world. This podcast used skype and had teachers from New York, New Hampshire and Europe. Not only did they uses skype to make these connection, but they also used chatrooms. I did not notice any sponsors as the first podcast but they did utilize music and I thought that was a nice touch.

MacBreak Weekly and This Week in Photography were the only two that had nothing to do with K-12 education. The MacBreak Weekly podcast seemed to be the largest podcast. They had many sponsors and sounded more like a morning talk show. There was tons of jokes and banter. This Week in Photography also had tons of sponsors. It reminded me more of the initial podcast that I listened to.

Although I am still not exactly sure how podcasting is done, I can see how this would be a wonderful tool for teaching. I really liked the ideas from KidCast and would be interested in how to create a podcast so that I can utilize it in my classroom. Podcasts would be a great way to communicate with parents, too. In addition to the a weekly letter I think a weekly podcast would be wonderful. Also, the amount of continuing education that a teacher can get out of sharing with one another is simply astronomical! I will continue to search through the itune podcasts to see what else I can learn about.

International Blogging

I found it more difficult to find information on international blogging than I did here in the U.S. This made no sense to me until I realized that all of the search engines I was using were U.S. based. So I began typing co.uk and ran across a few.

The first article I stumbled upon was Blogs in the classroom . This article addressed both U.S. and international school blogging. Clarence Fisher , a middle-school teacher in Canada, uses blogging for his class to respond to things ranging from classroom assignments to their weekend plans. One point that I wondered about was how do these get screened? Fisher reviews each entry before posting. Of course this does mean that yet another duty or task will be added on to the teachers day. However, Fisher points out that this is a task he is willing to do because he feels that blogging "sparks students' enthusiasm for computers, writing and opining." Fisher also points out that he feels this online journaling is giving his students the idea that they have a voice and it is being heard.




The second article I found was entitled Classroom 2.0 "Sustained Blogging in the Classroom" . This was a strange website since it really just gave me tons of links to follow Jeff Utecht, an international teacher in Shanghai, China.



I followed the links on this website and found tons of useful information regarding blogging in the classroom. Some links lead me to photo galleries , a final thought video from the '08 conference and of course the link to UtechTips . This is Jeff Utecht's website that he considers to be "a view of education for international educators." The amount of useful information I found linked to this one teacher was astronomical. Following is a link to the audio version of the Learning 2.0 Conference. Although it is lengthy, approximately 23 minutes, I still recommend listening to it in it's entirety. As a final note I would also like to share this video I found on UtechTips : .

U.S. K-12 Teachers Use Blogs In The Classroom

The first article I read was In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards . This article discussed how blogs or web logs are changing the classroom setting. Mrs. Dudiak , a second grade teacher in Frederick County, Md., found that her classroom web logs were much more beneficial than her typical group discussions or personal journals. One way she uses web logs is for her students to post what they saw and learned on a recent field trip to a Native American farm. She also noted that her typically quiet students were much more vocal online than in the class. Mrs. Dudiak makes note that "blogging is a different form of writing" and that even though the students are expected to proofread they are not held to the same grammatical rules as written work. The focus of blogging should be more on the content than anything else.

The second article that I read was Blogging from the Classroom, Teacher Seek Influence, Risk Trouble . Although this article gave some examples of how blogging can be used as an arena for teachers to communicate with one another to voice their frustrations within their school, classroom management ideas or lesson plans, I found that the meat of it was in regards to how it can affect a teacher's career if not used properly. Kilian Betlach, a languages arts teacher in Chicago, started a blog anonoymously as "TMAO" . Betlach is only one of many young teachers opening this discussion. Alexander Russo, a former parochial school teacher, notes that teacher blogs "raise important issues and give the rest of us a peek into a world that we see and hear about rarely or only anecdotally through the media." The author of this article, Eddy Ramirez, makes the statement that teacher blogs allow us to really see what is going on in our schools instead of just focusing on standardize test scores. I believe that both Russo and Ramirez are onto the same idea - passing first hand knowledge onto others can certainly open eyes to situations otherwise swept under the rug and perhaps "galvanize people to action." This article also goes on to warn those teachers blogging to exercise caution and to be aware that even though we all have free speech, courts have been ruling in the favor of schools so that they can reprimand teachers if their posts disrupted school operations. One of many notable links I ran into during this research was entitled Classroom 2.0. It gives wonderful YouTube links to 100 of the best YouTube Videos for Teachers.