What I'll take with me

CEdu 534 as a class almost encourages ADD. There are just too many great services, sites, and tools out there. Prior to the class I was aware of most all of these in a general sense. That doesn't mean that I didn't take anything from this class. Far from it. I actually am taking a bit of frustration and angst that my place of business has a technology structure in transition to put it nicely. In order to implement around this barrier I have to think about what is viable.

For me that is screencasting in the immediate future and podcasting of a sort in the next year. As for screencasting, I can immediately see the uses for implementation and I can start to develop a library for the my coming semester. I can embed these casts into my class moodles as well as into my class website. For podcasting, I am holding off on my implementation because I am hesitant to add to my work load but also because I do not relish the task of explaining and implementing some new system of information dissemination in the middle of a school year. This is the sort of mid stream jump that jeopardizes my ultimate goal of creating a comfortable work environment that is about learning communication skills rather than learning new technologies every week.

That then is what I am setting my sites on in the coming months.

The Power of Video

My senior year in high school I had first hour AP Calculus. Apparently a smaller school district near my own rural hometown wasn't offering AP Calc for the one student who qualified. In 1998-99 distance learning was... well... I don't know, bizarre but my school and her school were capable of it so it was arranged. It did not go well.

My teacher wasn't a bad guy but I'm fairly sure he was completely untrained for the task. For the first week of school he started the class ten minutes early because the video announcements never started. What he didn't take into account was that the student from the other student didn't know he was starting early. Within two weeks she had dropped the class.

I relate this because over the past two classes I have been involved in what I guess could be considered distance learning. I experienced an Internet outage and other students have had their issues as well but ten years after my first experience things have changed. The advent of Amazon's S3, YouTube, and a host of other services has transformed the teacher's ability to conduct a class despite difficulties. I myself was able to watch the class that I had missed after it had been retained and then posted by my professor. Later in the week, my group conducted an assigned web conference call and one of the group members recorded a section of it as proof of concept.

With storage and hosting coming at such bargains schools should be reevaluating the use of distance learning and digital recording of class as a means of teaching. It is not hard to imagine a nationwide school district that employs certified tutors as primary contacts and a host of specialty experts contracted for specific topics. My head has just begun spinning at a rate heretofore reserved for the Bears in the Superbowl. The possibilities are limitless for this sort of infrastructure - unfortunately not so for the Bears...

Podcasting

Podcasting, how might I use thee?

Shall I... kidding, I'm not going to write poetry. I have little to no love for the subject despite being an English teacher.

Seriosuly, though. I'd love to have a system set up where I might record the meanderings I call lectures as podcast and them make them available to my students. The reality may be a few years away though. The digital divide makes this a difficult if not impossible task because while I can require tasks which might require internet use, I would be hard pressed to require tasks that require heavy daily internet use. There are a few of my students that have to use the school's library or a public library for their internet use and I can't rightly demand they do this nightly.

In fact, the worst of it is that they are so shy or reticent to admit this that I can't even say a precise number of students whom this effects. Similar to this, I had a student tell me that she had no way of getting her paper typed at an uncle's house to school because she had to borrow a friends' usb drive to do it. After she told me that I immediately contacted the tech department to see what we could do about identifying these students and getting them a cheap jump drive. I mean, if I've got students suffering this much from a lack of tech, how can I expect them to be online listening to a lecture? Not to mention we have less than adequate facilities for doing it as a class in the building. /sigh

In 3-5 years I bet I won't have this problem, but I guess a man an only play the hand he is dealt.

Google Reader

I have to say that I'm loving Google Reader this past week. I had used the Safari or maybe Firefox RSS subscriber for all of ten minutes over the summer and ditched it quickly. If I recall, the problem was that I signed up for the EnGadget feed which was a mistake. Talk about a fire hose. EnGadget probably has a new post every five minutes and that quickly overwhelmed me. I was conscious of that this time.

What makes me love it this time around is that I've been reading four or five political website that get updated throughout the day by several authors. My previous killer feature had been tab browsing (circa two or three years ago) which completely changed the way I viewed the internet.

What I was doing with these politics sites was tabbing open The Swamp, Poltico, Swampland, Mudflats and ABCNews Politics. Next I would go down to where I thought I had left off and start reading from the bottom up. OF course as I went these sites would be giving me more links to recent article from the Washington Post, NY Times, Chicago Tribune, YouTube, the Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal and so on and so forth. You get the point. I usually did this at during my lunch time and usually I couldn't get through everything I wanted to read.

With Google Reader I'm able to see exactly how many new posts there are on each site and I only have to go to one spot for them. This greatly reduces my tab quantity and at the same time I am able to skip a few more of the articles because I get a list of their title and I can determine whether I want to actually read it.

Elgg'd

Wouldn't it be nice if every technology idea we had could be implemented... like, tomorrow?

This past week I investigated Elgg as part of the group work for CEdu534 and thought how great it would be for the school's sense of togetherness if there was a Facebook that was just the school. It could be accessed from within the school and used in many of the same ways. I won't belabor the point because we went into this in our forum discussion of the Think.com Podcast but I would add that my school is always talking about enhancing the community of the school.

At the moment, I am trying to push using Moodle in this way. We've created Moodle classrooms for clubs and we are talking about making a place for the Student Congress to collaborate on projects.

Hit the Ground Running

We read about the use of blogs in our text book and I thought I would touch on how I could start using that right now. At the moment I have a weekly assignment that is a response editorial to an online newspaper article. Essentially, I have been asking the students to submit a weekly blog but they don't think of it in that way.
The thought I've been having is, Why not open it up? Essentially, I could give the assignment a swift kick in the relevance by having it viewable by their classmates in our Moodle classroom so that each individual would know that others were trolling their opinions and reading the same articles. This would allow others to see excellent examples of the assignment done right and it would make it easier for me to point to credible attempts. Further those who as of yet have been doing a substandard job might find themselves shamed into doing better since they will be aware of the bright white heat of the audience.

8/18/08

Change is an ephemeral thing. So ephemeral that is made me just type that absurd cliche. The reality of the world is that everything changes and people who are unable or unwilling to incorporate it into their plan are left by the wayside. I would imagine the road to Val Halla is littered with Nordic warriors whose skill sets became out-moded faster than their heroic destinies could adapt.
The Leadership class I was involved with offered a board game version of this change within educational institutions. In a bizarre twist on role modeling my group was quickly whisked into the world that had been created for us and by the end of the three hours we had barely noticed the passage of time. It is a testament to the game that this was possible.
I took from this a deeper understanding of the angst I had at times felt when certain affairs within the school were not occurring quite as I would like them too. It also led me to question the motives of my colleagues. As school begins again I sit back in my meetings and realize how certain people are following along, ignoring the speaker, or displaying signs of obstinance. It can bee over generalized but I see the lay of the land more clearly than perhspas I did five weeks ago.