Learning as a Way of Teaching

I came across a middle school math teacher who makes his own music videos to teach math concepts in the classroom. Talk about keeping your students engaged. My question is, how does a teacher have that kind of time to put something like this together? I know it takes the right combination of talent, time, and technology. Kudos to those who have that winning combination.

I have recently acquired 3 Sony Stereo IC Recorders.  Here are my ideas for implementation:

Podcasting

• Podcasters could interview faculty members around school
• Families can be a part of podcasts as they record their family history
• Interviewing community leaders would be within reach
• Reporting “live” on field trips, capturing the sounds of what they are seeing

In the classroom

• Students recording themselves reading and then playing back.
• Teachers can recite spelling words for students to practice (listening with the included earphones)
• Centers can have a recorder to playback instructions for that activity

Communication

• Students can take home recorded messages from teachers (in English or Spanish)
• Co-Teachers can record thoughts to share with collaborating partners
• Content Mastery Teachers can get detailed messages about assignments coming from General Ed teachers

These are just a few of the ideas running through my brain.  What are your thoughts?

Arrington on the Air is a new podcast by Mrs. Arrington’s second grade class.   Their first episode was published today on her blog.  You could tell from their expressive voices that they had a good time putting this first episode together.  Check it out and give these young podcasters a boost of confidence as they begin their digital journey.

I have finally finished the first of hopefully will be many podcasts on inclusion. I love talking to teachers about inclusion practices and I love multimedia. It just seemed natural to me to create a podcast that combines those two loves.

Please indulge me and give me some feedback on this maiden voyage in the uncharted waters of podcasting. Well, uncharted for me.

Inclusioncast #1

Thanks to Audacity and a few iPods, our students took final exams 21st century style.  Instead of leaving the classroom to have tests read to them by another teacher, students stayed in the classroom and listened to their test on iPods.  They had the power to listen at their own discretion without having to be singled out.  Of course, they did look different since they had iPods and the others didn’t.

Their teacher made this comment:  “Instead of hanging their heads, they were actually excited about getting the help.”

The hardest part of the whole process was creating the audio files, and that process is not hard at all.

Now if I can just get the school to buy 10 more……

We are spending our last school day in the computer lab finishing up our space pages.  The students have really created some excellent looking sites and a few of them are ready to tackle adding a blog to the project.  I have used learner-blogs in the past, and I wanted to use them again here.

The hurdle I had to overcome was creating student blogs without an e-mail account for all of my students.  The Gmail trick is the answer, but Gmail is blocked by our Internet filter.  However, the filter cannot stop my iPhone!  HA HA!!!  So I registered my students using a Gmail alias that goes to my Gmail account, that I then retrieve using my iPhone.  I am able to activate the blogs and have the students blogging in no time.

In collaboration with one of our 7th grade science teachers, we were able to create The Great Space Race.  Students are building some great sites with great zeal and determination.  Googlepages has made it real easy for our novice web designers to make a good looking site with minimal effort or training.

The trick was getting Google accounts for our students.  After I went through the hassle of creating accounts for them, I discovered that many of our students had e-mail accounts that they could have used for the project.  We were not using e-mail, they just needed them for login purposes.  I consider it a lesson learned that perhaps I should get students to get an e-mail account before allowing them to participate in the project.  Hmm…

Kim discovered the power of subsidiary accounts with Gmail.  This trick did not work for our project because the alias e-mail would not work in order for them to sign up for a Google account.  However, I managed to get all the accounts created.