Skybrary Blog

I just checked into iTunes U … Wow! A huge wealth of information. On a personal note, I subscribed to a Learn Irish podcast for my vacation this summer. However, there are all sorts of language, science, math, professional, how-to, PBS, and more.

I may just have to push harder to get iTunes unblocked. I am truly amazed.

Video streaming and podcasting have tremendous potential to change our teaching for the better through the availability of a wide variety of resources readily available in short, easily integrated clips. Content can be better matched to the objective and used to reinforce individual points.

Money issues: Bandwidth, availability of projectors
Policy issues: Filtering

Creation of content by students and teachers is also a powerful tool for both engaging students in learning and communication with parents and community. As video editing tools become cheaper and easier to use, this becomes a much more viable option. The main barrier I see is time — time for students to research, plan, film, and edit a podcast or video clip becomes cumbersome at times because of unfamiliarity with the equipment and software for the majority of students. However, that should become easier with experience.

Supervision, supervision, supervision… one part of my job that I really hate is when I have to deal with the disciplinary part of when kids do stuff they are not supposed to. In most cases, the kids’ misbehavior is a result of poor teaching practices — too much free time, no sense that we do school stuff on school time and we use school resources for school stuff, no screen checking. It is frustrating because it does hurt our ability to delve into the Web 2.0 applications.

So much available — here’s what I can think of off the top of my head. What an improvement over when we were limited to what we taped from the instructional video feed.

DVD/VHS static
Discovery Streaming
Brainpop
Teacher Tube
You Tube
Podcasts
Individual sites
Create your own

I remember reading a post by Joyce Valenza about using a wiki for pathfinders — “Ten Reasons Why Your Next Pathfinder should be a Wiki” and decided to try it this year.

Our iTrt and I had tried various methods to standardize pathfinders — we both write them and bounce them back and forth for suggestions. We had the most success using Macromedia’s Contribute, which handled rights for saving and editing and made sure neither one of us overwrote what the other had done, but it still felt clunky. A wiki has worked well this year. For some assignments we have even had students add resources. It can be updated easily and quickly and now that we have a standard format, easy to create.

Our pathfinders are linked from the library home page out you can check out THMS pathfinders directly. I do have to credit Lori Lineweaver for using her knowledge of html to help with the formatting.