Learners For Life

WOW … what a ride! This “roller-coaster” learning experience took my breath away! However, like most roller-coasters, I initially paid for the ride, and got a few instructions on basic safety and what to expect.  Together with a number of “strangers”, I got buckled in and started slowly traveling up a somewhat steep learning curve as I moved from Internet Explorer to learning the fundamentals of Firefox and then the rudiments of creating my own Edublog. As my colleagues and I slowly teetered at the top, there was a sudden silence as we had a brief opportunity to quickly scan the upcoming terrain and prepare for the anticipated twists and turns that we were about to navigate as part of the remaining “things”. With a piercing shriek and our “hearts in our throats”, we accelerated downward through RSS feeds as our brains were bombarded by the sensory overload of information appearing in our Google Reader. The centrifugal force generated by the first hairpin curve pressed down on my stomach as I absorbed the G-forces associated with learning to use a wiki. While I screamed at the top of my lungs and fought to control of my gag reflex, I thankfully got a brief break. However, I barely caught my breath before my eyes “Flickr-ed” as they became inundated with a kaleidoscope of photos shared with a Creative Commons license. Just when I thought I might gain some control, we were flipped into an inverted spin where we investigated the wealth of educational resources provided by the K12 Online Conference and reflected on why we had agreed to take this professional development “ride”. Suddenly, we approached another curve and our enthusiastic colleagues collaborated by holding their hands in the air as they experienced the “rush” of social bookmarking and tagging. The speed of the course seemed to increase each second as we absorbed the bumps along the way and shouted out excitedly through podcasts as gravity pulled us back  to ground level. Before we knew it, the ride had come to an end. We climbed out of our seats, with legs shaking, and looked forward to sharing our experiences with our friends who, unfortunately, lacked the risk-taking attribute that we have demonstrated. Will they believe us? Can they see our enthusiasm? Of course, we can convince them because the “strangers”, who joined us on this roller-coaster ride, are now “friends” and perhaps some have uploaded their photos and shared their experiences through digital stories through YouTube or VoiceThread. Furthermore, we can always go back and re-live the “things” by examining the reflections and insights that have been shared in our blogging diaries. As we exit the roller-coaster, and walk down the ramp with our “new found friends”, we compare our adventure ride and share comments about the plunges, curves, and flips that we thought were most exhilarating and will never forget.

Perhaps, back home, we might invite some of our colleagues to join our personal learning network where we can help them see the benefits of engaging students through the use of web 2.0 applications. If dialoging about  our experiences gained on this ride doesn’t convince them, I feel confident that demonstrating the educational tools that we have mastered will whet their enthusiasm.

The final question that all riders have to ask? Was the ride worth it? For me, …  it is a resounding “YES”!

Although my last blog entry appears to be an analogy, I believe that this roller-coaster ride not only impacts the teacher-riders but more importantly has the potential to influence all their students and many other teachers with whom they come in contact.

Where do I go from here? As a life-long-learner, I have found this ride extremely stimulating  and I eagerly look forward to creating a new blog to share my experiences with my colleagues in Manitoba.

Take care & keep smiling

Credits: “Coaster” by Joe Rollerfan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rollerfan/3943739578/

As a long-time user of the Internet, I am quite familiar with the analogy which states that acquiring information from the world-wide-web is like “trying to drink from a firehose”. However, I recently had this concept reinforced when I purchased a British magazine titled the “Blogger’s Handbook“. The following quote blew me away:

Technorati currently tracks over 112 million blogs and over 175,000 new blogs being created worldwide every day.”

As more and more teachers and students move from being traditional Internet consumers to Internet producers, this  “information overload” will only dramatically accelerate as new, educational blogs, podcasts, and resources are created and shared.

How can we, as educators, survive this torrent of information? Undoubtedly, we must become practical and adhere to the maxim which states that “your friends are your filters”. Here are six suggestions that I think can help educators manage this infoglut.

1. Create your own Personal Learning Network (PLN) by contacting two, or three, like-minded educators in your own school division and suggest that this “team” begin sharing bookmarks and resources by email.
2. Learn how to tag useful, educational resources with Diigo (with the possibility, that in time, you may share resources with educators in your PLN)
3. Each member of your PLN selects three different educational blogs that s/he will review weekly and share relevant information with the other colleagues by email. For example, in a PLN of four educators, each member benefits by potentially acquiring information from 12 different educational blogs.
4. Join a social network site such as Classroom 2.0, K12 Online Ning,  or The Educator’s PLN.
5. Encourage your PLN members to sign up for Twitter, begin following other educators, and sending out “tweets” of educational relevance.
6. Acquire a Google account, start using Google Reader to follow a limited number of educational feeds, and share newsworthy information with your PLN.

As an educator you must begin “working smarter not harder” if you are to begin to infuse technology into your learning and teaching. By creating or becoming a contributing member of an active Personal Learning Network, you help “leverage learning” so that all members of your community of learners benefit and grow.

Take care & keep smiling

Credit: “Road maps” by Pete Reed:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/petereed/3258043981/

This blog entry is stimulated by an entry in my RSS feed from “Ideas and Thoughts“, a stimulating blog created by Dean Shareski. In his “More on Stages” reflection, Shareski describes watching his 10-year-old daughter, who was just learning to play volleyball, engage in a competition. It appeared that anyone who was able to serve the ball over the net was pretty well assured of winning the point. He went on to say, “As a sport enthusiast it was painful. As a parent, it was exciting.” With unbridled enthusiasm, parents and spectators, cheered for all individual players regardless whether they were on “your team” or the opposition, because they realized that the girls were learning the fundamentals of a new sport.

However, Shareski posed two questions that caused me to reflect:
1.    Why are we, as parents (or spectators) in the audience, so willing to overlook the flaws and weaknesses of students in sporting events and yet when academic progress is shared with a larger audience (outside the classroom) we become somewhat anxious?
2.    Why are we, as parents and spectators more, actively engaged in witnessing the improvement of our sons and daughters in sporting events than we are in cheering on their accomplishments in the academic arena?

I certainly agree with Shareski’s two observations and offer my thoughts. Perhaps the anxiety that one feels, be it a parent or a teacher, when a child’s or student’s work is shared with a wider audience is an expression of the adult ego. Unfortunately, some parents feel that the “mistakes” that their son or daughter has made in an essay shared on a school’s public web site is a reflection on the parent’s own competency. Likewise a teacher, who posts a student’s essay, which has, for example, the improper use of “to, too, and two”, might feel that such a revelation on the school web site reflects back on his/her teaching. Perhaps such a teacher feels s/he may be criticized because there may be a perception that this homophone concept has not been taught, or at least mastered, by this individual student.

To suggest that anxiety is heightened in both parents and the teacher due to egotism may seem rather insensitive. Perhaps the word “ownership” is more applicable. The parents take more ownership than they should, for the errors in the essay, while the teacher takes more ownership for concepts that the student has not yet mastered. It is indeed interesting, as Shareski points out, that a similar “lack of skills” on the volleyball or basketball court are more easily accepted with the hope that in future practices and games, these fundamentals will be acquired.

Furthermore, this anxiety caused by having one’s son’s or daughter’s errors displayed on the school website can be heightened even further if the parent of the child is also a teacher. Just like parents, who are police officers, may warn their child to never engage in shop lifting or breaking the law because it will reflect back on them as adults, teachers may have the same fear. Teachers, who should understand the acquisition of grammar skills and the development of children, can still be intimidated if it is their child displaying errors for other children and parents to see because it reflects back on their profession.

Perhaps, the reason that we are so critical of grammatical errors in essays is that we, as adults have gone through this same essay-writing process and have similar classroom experience. I’m hoping that as students move to showcasing and displaying their multi-media/web 2.0 talents in a collaborative process on the internet, we, as parents, will be less willing to take ownership and be as critical for these perceived flaws because we will have less experience in the multimedia environment and the expanded capabilities of the web.

Shareski’s second point suggests that perhaps parents need to be just as involved in witnessing their son’s or daughter’s academic growth as they are involved in their sporting events.

I can only hope that as schools get “more connected” to the community, parents will have an increased opportunity to witness their son’s or daughter’s academic development. Imagine the benefits, between the classroom and the community, which could be amassed if parents could view on their home computer the processes that their respective children went through in solving a problem, conducting research, completing an experiment or showcasing their knowledge through a multimedia presentation

So what do you think? The ball’s now in your court.

Take care & keep smiling

When you start your browser, which page is initially loaded? Is it your school’s or school division’s web site? Perhaps you have chosen to point your initial start page, like me, to a search engine such as Google or Bing. Regardless, the first page that loads should be a potential jump-off point to help the user retrieve information more quickly or link to a variety of beneficial resources that one frequently uses.

For years my initial start page had either been our school division’s web site or Google.

Educators who want to be able to harness the information and leverage the power of web 2.0 applications need to investigate using Pageflakes as their start page.  I must admit that once I created my new start page using the Teacher Edition of Pageflakes at: http://teacher.pageflakes.com/ I was quite willing to change the home page web address in my browser, from the former Google URL, to point to my new Pageflakes (teacher-edition) start page.

“But don’t you miss the easy access to Google when you start up your browser?”, you ask.

“No, because Pageflakes, allows me to customize and add modules (called “flakes”) including my favourite Google search, as well as, a wealth of other tools including a calendar, some sticky notes,a to do list, email access, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter, a weather forecast and del.icio.us bookmarks, for example.”

In our busy lives as educators, the time saving convenience of having most of the tools thatone uses on a daily basis in one location is immeasurable. Furthermore, I like the Pageflakes’ flexibility which allows the educator to create a “pagecast” consisting of both private and public pages. For example, a teacher who has a family member suffering with cancer might not want to keep their RSS feeds, into possible treatments, or personal links private as opposed to sharing such a page with their students. However, teachers can use their Pageflakes account to create both their own “private” personal pages and additional “public” pages that can be shared with students or parents.

Pageflakes makes it easy for teachers to create/customize a page for each class or subject area which can display “flakes” or modules which:

• focus on the latest subject-related research or discoveries supplied by RSS feeds
• provide calendars and assignment due dates for students and parents
• share links to resources which supplement lessons

However, I end this post with a caution or two. For those educators who decide to explore Pageflakes, I strongly encourage them to investigate the “Teacher Edition of Pageflakes” rather than the generic Pageflakes version found at www.pageflakes.com. If one uses the generic Pageflakes to create “public-viewed” pages for students and/or parents, an embedded link to a “random pagecast” is always displayed. Unfortunately, we can never be sure as to the content displayed on someone else’s web page or “pagecast”. For this reason, I believe it is important to reduce the chance of our Pageflake readers linking to inappropriate material from any shared resource that we, as teachers, create.

Several years ago, when educators in our school division started using Blogger to communicate with students and parents, I had a similar concern. I contacted the teachers and showed them how they could “tweak” the Blogger HTML to remove the Blogger navigational bar. Unfortunately, without this “tweak”, the ever-present navigational bar automatically displayed a “Next Blog” link. As I used to tell my colleagues, “On the blogger servers, we do not know who are neighbours are.” By removing such links in either Blogger or Pageflakes, we are reducing potential problems.

Although I am exited by the potential of the “one stop shop” that the Teacher Edition of Pageflakes provides, I have a personal reservation that I must explore further before I endorse this tool unequivocally. As an educator, who networks well with colleagues, I do my best to try and remember what areas of interest or passions my various colleagues have. Whenever I encounter resources on the web that I feel might be of interest, I share the information with the individual(s) by email. I have often told them that “If the resources or information I send you are of no interest to you or a colleague, you know where the <Del>ete key is located”. If we add this compulsion to share with the fact that I often get side-tracked when I navigate the web, one begins to see the impact that Pageflakes, may have on my time. I am so intrigued by the resources, ideas and wealth of information that I acquire as a result of hyper-linking through blogs and web sites. However, although such “serendipitous learning” can be delightful, it also be a time-consuming habit. Now add Pageflakes to this scenario, where I am bombarded by plethora of information every time I start my browser, and you may appreciate how I may get somewhat distracted and deviate from my original task.

In summary, I feel that it is more important that I learn to focus and utilize my time better than to dispense with the power of having a web 2.0 tool like Pageflakes working on my behalf.

Take care & keep smiling

Are you looking for a collaborative tool? Would you like to extend the regular classroom time so that your engaged students can continue problem solving outside school? Are you concerned that students with access to home computers may not have the exact same applications that you use in your school’s computer lab? Furthermore, are you concerned that your students cannot easily network at home because some students are using Windows based computers, while others use Macintosh?

If any of these questions apply to your situation, then perhaps you, and your students, should investigate Google Docs at: http://docs.google.com

Google Docs is an online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tool, whose features look very much like Microsoft Office. However, because Google Docs is accessed through one’s browser, it does not matter whether the user is using a Macintosh or Windows-based computer. However, the main reason I would encourage educators and students to use Google Docs is for the collaborative opportunity that this application affords. Projects or activities can be shared through Google Docs with selected collaborating individuals. This makes it possible for students to work as a team, outside regular school hours, on a project that engages them.

Google Docs – Spreadsheet

For example, when I taught junior high Mathematics, I found myself intrigued by the way different students solved puzzles. Classic problems used letters to represent numbers which could be displayed as simple calculation problems in disguise. One must replace each letter by a digit using 0 to 9. The same digit must be used to represent the same letter. So if you believed that 2 is used to represent the letter E, then 2 must be used for all E’s in the same problem. Of course, one must use a different digit for different letters. After one substitutes all the letters for numbers, a perfectly valid calculation problem will result.

However, although puzzles like the one illustrated can be assigned to teams to collaboratively solve using Google Docs, I would be most interested in having team members identify the strategies that they used to determine the correct solution.

For example, a collaborating team might suggest the following observations:

• O must be an even number since E + E = O
• W will be odd if E + E is greater than 10 since a 1 would be carried over to the 10′s column
• T cannot exceed 9 otherwise there would be a carry over with a 4 digit sum
• T will be odd only if the W is 10 or greater and there is a need to carry a 1 to 100′s column
• Largest value of O is 4 in the 100′s column otherwise sum becomes a 4 digit value
• If O cannot exceed 4, then the E’s in the 1′s column must be either 1 or 2. E cannot be 0 because the sum would also be 0 and two different letters E and O cannot have the same value

Hypothesis: Assume E is 2, then O must be 4 and T might be 8 if there is no carry over from 10′s column. Then if N was 3, W must be 6.

Hypothesis: There can be more than one correct answer. Assume E is 1, then O is 2. Further assume T is 5 because there is a carry over from the 10′s column. Then N could be 5 and W could be 0. An alternative could have N equaling 7 and thus W would be 4.

Regardless, Google Docs, is an innovative tool that can provide students with Internet access to work from home in a collaborative team to problem solve and engage in problem solving opportunities mathematical challenge.

Additional Information:

Spreadsheets: A Problem Solving Puzzle Creator – “Bits and Bytes” – January, 2001   http://www.wsd1.org/bitsbytes/0001/bbjan01/#STORY1

Google Docs Forms:

One of the innovative ways Google Docs can be used in the classroom is to conduct on-line surveys. Not only can survey forms easily be constructed, the data collected can be displayed in a meaningful manner.

When designing projects that require a collaboration or a team approach, many educators are concerned as to how to assign grades to individual team members in a fair manner. The following approach, using the Google Docs survey form, may help educators better assess individual students. After a collaborative project is completed, have each member of the team complete a Google Docs “form” survey, similar to the following, in which each of the following categories/fields must be completed:

1. Team Member First Name
2. Team Member Surname
3. Project Name or Team Name
4. In your opinion, which team member contributed the most work to this collaborative project?  First Name, Surname

Once the project is finished and the data from this Google Docs forms survey is collected, a teacher can more easily identify which students are taking leadership roles on various teams.

Take care & keep smiling

Is there one YouTube video that every teacher and parent should view? I definitely think so. In my opinion, everyone should set aside 76 minutes to watch the most inspiring video that exists on the Internet today. In this video, Randy Pauch, a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, speaks to students in a new “Journeys” lecture series in which members of the university community share “reflections and insights on their personal and professional journeys.” In the opening few minutes of the video Randy explains, in his humorous manner, that this “Journeys” lecture used to be called “The Last Lecture”.  For Randy, who has recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, this lecture, which is subtitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”, has special meaning and his inspirational message needs to be shared with educators and parents alike.

Although one may download a PDF transcript of Randy’s “Last Lecture”, readers are encouraged to view the above video to hear his passion and the way he interacts with his audience.

If, however, you cannot invest 76 minutes, I recommend that you, at least, view this lecture reprise which condenses the essence of Randy’s longer video down to approximately 12 minutes.

For a Father’s Day gift, I was given Randy’s book entitled “The Last Lecture”. I encourage you to peruse an on-line excerpt or listen to Randy as he reads the Introduction. I found it to be truly inspiring and provided additional insight in to Randy Pausch, the teacher, the husband, and dad.

In a previous post, I asked the question “Can one individual influence many?“. Undoubtedly, Randy Pausch did … and he continues to do so.

Take care & keep smiling Brian

When asked to select one humorous YouTube video, I immediately thought of a skit created by the Wavelenth Incorporated team who provides professional development sessions for educators. The video, entitled “Funny Teacher Rant“, showcases an elementary teacher who “loses it” in a simulated group therapy session as she lists all the initiatives, directives and changes that she has been asked to explore/implement over the past few years. This video, which I have shared with many, has a humorous message that all teachers can relate to and appreciate.

Take care & keep smiling

When asked to select two videos “that relate to your teaching content and/or professional learning interests”, I immediately thought of the work of Karl Fisch. This innovative teacher, from Arapahoe High School in Colorado, willingly shares his vision of education and 21st century learning with technology through his staff development blog called “The Fischbowl“.

The question raised in this blog post title is one that many teachers ask. How can an individual educator have a significant impact? I’m sure that when Karl first created and shared his PowerPoint slide presentation entitled “Did you know?/Shift Happens” at the start of the 2006-07 school year, his target audience was his high school colleagues.  He states that …

I put together a PowerPoint presentation with some (hopefully) thought-provoking ideas. I was hoping by telling some of these “stories” to our faculty, I could get them thinking about – and discussing with each other – the world our students are entering. To get them to really think about what our students are going to need to be successful in the 21st century, and then how that might impact what they do in their classrooms.

However, by sharing this PowerPoint slide presentation through his “Fischbowl” blog, he allowed his talents and vision to be shared with a much wider, global audience. Not only did Karl receive accolades and feedback on his initial version, he created and shared a message which other educators could modify and share. For example, Scott McLeod and Karl Fisch collaborated/remixed the original version by removing the Arapahoe-specific slides, asked questions of the viewers and Xplane enhanced the presentation with animation to make it more visually appealing. The result was Version 2.0 of “Did you know?/Shift Happens” which was shared through Karl’s blog and YouTube videos. Since then a new variation of the Karl’s original vision and message has been created/released each year as follows:

• “Did you Know?/Shift Happens” – V2.0 – (Jun, 2007) – Made more visually appealing
• “Did you Know?/Shift Happens” – V3.0 – (Aug, 2008) – The music industry re-mix
• “Did you Know?/Shift Happens” – V4.0 – (Sep, 2009) – Media convergence re-mix

As a educator engaged in conducting workshops for K-12 teachers, I have shared Karl Fisch’s PowerPoint slides and YouTube videos during many professional development opportunities. However, I think that it is an interesting exercise to see how an idea or vision, that was initially shared by an individual at one high school in Colorado, has “gone viral” and, through a morphing process has led to four different variations which all reflect Karl’s core message. Furthermore, it is estimated that this video and its various versions have been viewed and/or downloaded more than 20 million times!

So I ask you again … can one individual influence many? I encourage you to share your ideas and resources with colleagues, write about your educational experiences in a blog and perhaps create a video to showcase your vision. Can one individual influence many?  Become a risk-taker! Share your ideas! Karl Fisch did and we, as students and educators, are all richer for it.

Take care & keep smiling

I have just created my first podcast! No … it is not a reflective opportunity for me to discuss “21st century learners” nor is it a chance for me to “bend your ear” about digital storytelling. Rather it was somewhat simple, in that I recorded a joke that I found on-line. True, this podcast message may not be profound, but our “23 Things” journey and the engagement with which I have tackled the tasks and related discovery, have indeed had a profound impact on my learning.

I believe that as teachers we need to look for alternative ways that students can complete assignments to demonstrate that they understand the related concepts of the particular unit of study. For example, I see digital storytelling and podcasting as two opportunities to engage students in unique ways that demonstrate their understanding and can be used as creative alternatives to the traditional, over-used, essay.

To help ease students into podcasting, I’d recommend that they record a “clean” joke, add some optional sound effects, save the resulting mp3 file and share it as a podcast. Once students have learned the rudiments on a relatively short joke, they can then use these same techniques to create more extensive, and well thought out, podcast.

Some possible podcasts strategies that might be attempted include:

• Using the “scribe post” process, have a student (or student teams) create a podcast of certain lessons that are shared with the other class members.
• At the end of the school year, ask students to create a podcast reviewing the concepts covered during the term.
• Prior to parent-teacher nights, ask each student to create a reflective podcast which outlines what the student has accomplished and what goals the student is setting for the next term. Each student podcast would be shared with his/her parents.
• Teachers of early years children may wish to record each student as s/he reads a passage from a book. If the same passage is recorded at the beginning and end of a school year, the results could then be shared with parents to indicate progress. However, I would keep these audio files on a local computer, to maintain confidentiality, rather than post the audio files to a remote server.

However, I did encounter an unexpected “hiccup” when I was challenged to to embed the GCast podcast player into my blog. I created the above podcast which was hosted on the GCast web site. I followed the steps provided to embed the GCast player in my blog. I selected the medium-sized player display, with a blue colour scheme and selected the “No” options on both the “Auto-play” and “Repeat” features. I copied the embedded code which was provided and inserted it using the HTML display into my blog. When I posted the blog update and refreshed my blog display, I was able to click on the GCast player “play” button and hear my first podcast with no problem.

So, you ask, where was the hiccup? Well, it wasn’t until several days later when I returned to my blog, to my Thing 18 entry, that I noticed the GCast player was now displaying a different podcast title in the window. Sure enough, when I clicked on the play button, I heard another colleague discussing “how to make pepperoni bread”. True, this cooking show podcast was much more educational than my joke, but I was under the impression that if one was to embed the GCast podcast player in your blog, it would play your podcast. Not so … I found out.

Having some background familiarity in HTML, I examined the GCast embedded code and found only references to the player specifics. There did not appear to be a unique link to my particular podcast that was hosted on the GCast server. So I began looking at the blogs of other colleagues, who were engaged with me in “23 Things”, to see if their GCast podcast player’s embedded code differed from mine. Unfortunately, I was disappointed as I was unable to find another colleague who had successfully embedded the GCast podcast player into their own blog. My next step was to search the Internet where several entries indicated that the GCast player did not work properly within a WordPress blog format. Not wanting to give up, I uploaded my “joke” mp3 audio file again to the GCast server as well as some other sample sounds. Unfortunately, on several occasions, the GCast upload process “hiccuped” and a blue, “boo-boo” warning screen appeared which stated “Whoops – you just found a boo-boo. Please re-load the page – it might clear up the problem”. On one audio file upload, I had to re-load/refresh the process four times due to the “boo-boo hiccups”. Imagine my surprise, when I logged into GCast and viewed both the Master Play List  and the Podcast-O-Rama to find that my “Joke of the Day” podcast has been uploaded four times.

What I was able to discover is that I did follow the steps correctly. However when one embeds the GCast podcast player into you blog or wiki, the player automatically links back to the last-created podcast within your group. So while my “Joke of the Day” was the last upload in our “K-12 Learning” group, my blog displayed the correct title in the GCast podast player and the audio included a punch line. However, as soon as my colleague uploaded her podcast on “how to make pepperoni bread”, my joke title entry in the GCast podcast player was replaced and the “play” button now targeted a cooking show audio file. Not only did this update automatically occur within the blog, the same update-to-the-latest upload process occurred in my wiki as well.

However, I later discovered that the GCast podcast player does have other options that I had not fully explored. True, this podcast player automatically displays and plays the last uploaded podcast from our group. However, readers of your blog can still play your particular podcast, through the GCast podcast player, if you provide the following instructions:

To play my podcast:
1. At the bottom of the GCast podcast player, click the “POSTS” link; and
2. Scroll down and select my podcast entitled  “Life Long Learner’s Joke”.

In summary, if you want your podcast to be easily available to your readers, you can embed a hyper-link the mp3 file within your blog. On the other hand, if you want to provide your readers with a variety of podcast samples, you might prefer to embed the GCast podcast player in your blog. Just make certain to prompt readers to use the vertical scroll bar to move down through the various podcast examples until yours is located and shared.

Credits:
This podcast was created using “Audacity” (a freeware/open source application for Windows, Macintosh & Linux computers).
Audacity can be downloaded from: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Two sound effects have been blended into the start and end of this podcast. They are:
- Introduction: 23874__Connum__newswav.wav and
- Ending (rim shot): 37215__Simon_Lacelle__Ba_da_dum.wav
These sound effects have been downloaded from The Freesound Project at: http://www.freesound.org/

Take care & keep smiling

Podcasting in education has a great deal of potential. Although I am a visual and not an auditory learner, I still believe that podcasts or mp3 audio files containing educational material will indeed support the learning of many of our students. If teachers create or share podcasts of their lessons and support material, such audio files may provide an opportunity for those attending the class to review the material as well as giving students who were absent from class a chance to keep up with their classmates. Furthermore, educators can use podcast audio files as an additional way to keep current with the latest educational and technological trends. A colleague of mine downloads podcasts of interest from the  “Ted Talks” (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) web site and transfers them to his iPod. Each evening when he goes out for a walk or jog, he plays back these inspirational audio files.

As part of the Thing 17,  I explored the educational podcasts displayed in the Grazr widget. I drilled down through the menus of “for Educators” > “Educational Technology” > “Teachers Teaching Teachers” > to a podcast entitled “Meet Lisa Dick and George Haines: Talking about research and diigo“. I was quite impressed with the functionality of the built-in audio “mp3player” plug-in that was displayed at the top of the page describing the contents of their Aug. 26, 2009 podcast. Using my computer as my “radio”, I was able to use the “forward” button on the “mp3player” to start playing the podcast. When I was interrupted, and had to “suspend” the playing of the podcast, I simply pressed the “pause” button. However, when I wished to resume the podcast, I simply pressed the “forward” button and the podcast automatically resumed from the point at which it had been suspended.  Furthermore, if I wished to skip ahead in the podcast, or review a recently played portion for clarification, I could drag the progress “marker” button along the timeline bar and continue the podcast at this new location. The control buttons of this built-in “mp3player” offered me the functionality that I have come to expect when working with audio files.

Unfortunately, I found this same functionality lacking when I used iTunes to play selected podcasts. Although I use a Windows computer, I have previously installed iTunes so that I can download individual music tracks purchased with my iTunes gift card. Until I became engaged in this current Thing 17 lesson, I have used iTunes exclusively for purchasing and downloading music to my iPod.

I began my exploration of the iTune podcasts using the following steps:

1. Started the iTunes application;
2. From the left hand menu, selected the “iTunes Store” menu item;
3. Chose to examine podcast categories by clicking the drop down list box triangle displayed to the right of the main “Podcasts” top menu;
4. Selected the “Technology” podcast category;
5. Scrolled down and selected the “TWiT” (This Week in Tech”) with Leo LaPorte & Friends icon;
6. I scrolled down through the list of TWiT podcasts and selected the “Twit 209: Dvorak Shrugged”; and
7. I double-clicked this 1:40:37 podcast and which began with a series of advertisements.

Having regularly perused “PC Magazine” in past, I always read John Dvorak’s articles and, likewise, was enjoying this podcast until I was interrupted at approximately the 10 minute mark. I naturally clicked on the iTunes middle “pause” button and the audio was suspended as I intended. After dealing with the interruption, I wanted to continue hearing the remainder of this lengthy podcast, so I clicked on the middle “play” button. Guess what? The podcast automatically reverted to the beginning where I was forced to once again listen to the commercial messages. Furthermore, I was unable to drag the progress indicator to the 10 minute location so I could continue with podcast. Thinking that this might be a corrupt audio file, I tried the same process on other iTune podcasts and found that I was unable to continue from a “paused” location midway through a podcast. Each iTunes podcast automatically reverted to the beginning whenever a “pause” action was initiated.

Thinking that I needed to set a control option in iTunes, I “googled” and found an entry entitled “Tip: Getting back to where you left off in iTunes“. It appeared that all I needed to do was to check off the “Remember playback position” option in iTunes. I right-clicked on an iTunes musical track and selected the “Get Info” > “Options” where I could then click on “Remember playback option”. Once I made this change, I tested my TWiT podcast and found that I was still unable to continue from the paused location. When I right-clicked on the TWiT podcast icon and selected the “Get Info” option, I found that the “Remember playback option” was “grayed out” and could not be selected under the “options” window. Needless to say, I was rather frustrated.

Perhaps it has to do with audio streaming because the TWiT podcasts are rather lengthy but I feel that busy educators need to have more control over podcast playback. I can assure you busy teachers, listening to lengthy podcasts, will be interrupted and they will want to be able to resume where they left off or skip ahead to other areas of interest in iTunes podcasts.

If readers can suggest alternatives or solutions to this apparent lack of audio control flexibility in the iTunes podcast application, I welcome their feedback and recommendations.

Take care & keep smiling