A snapshot from the two workshops I taught yesterday–
We spent the morning talking about wikis. We discussed how the ability to collaboratively write, arrange the page, and edit gives students more of a voice. Another subject that came up was the idea of how the collaborative writing gives students an opportunity to practice their negotiating skills as they come to agreement on content on a project.
One advantage we saw with wikis is that because they are available 24/7, it eliminates some of the problems with collaborative projects, like students trying to get together in person. We also talked about the value in the business world of research being a joint effort, instead of an isolated one. Then we moved into the practical stages of creating wikis and all the participants created their own on either pbwiki or wetpaint.
In the afternoon, I taught a workshop on podcasting. This is the first time I have taught this to a class this varied–we had K-12 teachers, including foreign language, special education, speech, gifted-talented, and librarians. So it gave us all an interesting perspective on ideas for using podcasts in the classroom. We explored places to find podcasts, using iTunes, listened to a few examples like Tech Chick Tips, and then explored various ways to record them.
The elementary teachers had a lot of ideas for using the digital recorders to integrate student audio into movie maker, a museum project, to create jingles for advertising or remembering vocabulary, and on and on.
Our special education teachers had some innovative ideas for using podcasting with dyslexic students, and also as a tool to help them with their own software. The foreign language teachers were looking more for podcasts that used the native languages, rather than podcasts that teach the language, so I’m planning to try to locate some French and Spanish news podcasts for them.
As a culminating activity, the attendees formed groups and each group created their own podcast on potential uses they saw for podcasting with students. So here are their ideas in their own words in their very first podcasts!
podcast_carol_lorrie.mp3 Carol and Lorrie
podcast uses.mp3 Susannah, Ruth, and Donna
RhoniMacFinal.mp3 Rhoni & Mac McClennahan
Anne and Linda’s podcast.mp3 Ann and Linda
librarians.mp3 Kathy, Linda, and Shannon
(One of them won’t upload properly so you can see all of them at the bottom of the wiki site we used for the class, as well as the tools that we used for the day.)
Congratulations to our budding podcasters!