Podcasting Notes.....

Podcast
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable media players and personal computers. The term, like "radio", can refer either to the content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster.
The term "podcast" is a portmanteau of the acronym "Pod" – standing for "Portable on Demand" – and "broadcast". The iPod name was coined with Pod, prefixed with the "i" commonly used by Apple for its products and services. The first podcasting scripts were developed for the iPod (see history of podcasting). These scripts allow podcasts to be automatically transferred to a mobile device after they are downloaded.[1]
Though podcasters' web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.



From: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~nshelley/

Summary
Podcasting is a new method of communication allowing anyone to create audio files and post them to the Internet for others to download and listen to at any time. These audio files can be downloaded to a personal computer or handheld device such as an iPod.
Podcasting has rapidly become a new medium for both commercial and home-grown talk shows on multiple subjects. The relative ease of production and low costs associated with the making of a Podcast has opened this new medium to the masses.

The desired outcome is:
- Students learn the technical skills needed to record a high-quality podcast.
- Students brainstorm, and design the themes and content of their Podcast with teacher
guidance.
- Students complete pre-production, production, and post-production of their Podcast.
- Students ultimately learn project management skills, Podcasting technical skills, and actively
use the Podcast as a medium for positive student expression.

Time Allocation:
Podcasts usually take 3-4 weeks to produce, so teachers should aim to make
one Podcast a month to start. Once students are more familiar with the process, the number
of Podcasts produced can increase as desired. To make the most efficient use of time teachers
should follow the below process steps for creating the Podcast:

- Review computer skills and software needed for production process.
- Define the purpose of the Podcast.
- Organize students to participate.
- Brainstorm potential topics for the Podcast with students (Weekly classroom news broadcast,
document a field trip, share book reviews, etc.)
- Divide up topics to pairs of students for content/script production.
- Produce rough scripts with students.
- Practice recording the content a few times (like a dress rehearsal).
- Record the Podcast content
- Edit recording in Garageband or other audio program.
- Post content to Internet and RSS feed
- Advertise Podcast availability to peers.

Technology Use:
Teachers will need to posses intermediate computer skills and should familiarize themselves with the technical aspects of the production process before trying to teach the skills to students.

Teachers will be using the following computer hardware and software:
- Macintosh computer with built-in microphone or external handheld microphone with stand.
The computer must meet the system requirements of the software used to record the
Podcast.
- Apple Garageband software (part of the iLife software suite)
- An RSS feed software package such as Feeder ($29.95). This is to submit the web address of
your RSS feed to podcast directories, including iTunes, to tell the world about the podcast!
- Web space on an Internet server for hosting the audio files.
- Apple iTunes for subscribing to and downloading the Podcast.

Software Review

Math Circus – Act 1 is an educational software series has been extremely
popular in schools across the world. The software helps children enjoy mathematics and develop their problem-solving skills using the circus as its theme. Each section of the software has twelve puzzles and five levels of difficulty for each. The difficulty levels range from the very simple through to the very challenging. This makes it suitable for a wide range of ages and abilities, from preschool to the secondary level.

The program covers many mathematical topics such as positive and negative numbers, addition, multiplication, sums involving money, 2 and 3 dimensional geometry, sorting by color and shape, the physics of pendulums and trajectories, and even programming sequences of movements. More importantly, Math Circus - Act 1 challenges and encourages students to think for themselves.

In terms of user friendliness, Math Circus – Act 1 utilizes vibrant colours that are fun, inviting, and reflect its circus theme. The program also incorporates a pleasant tune that welcomes the user to “educational fun with numbers”. The navigation system begins as a rather straightforward approach while selecting your game type, however quickly becomes convoluted during game play. For instance, after completing a puzzle in the Seal Balance game the program appears to come to a halt. The initial reaction is that the game is loading the next puzzle, however the reality is the game is waiting for the user to press the continue button. The continue button is not labeled, and not strategically placed on the screen. The user must randomly start clicking on the screen to understand how to progress to the next puzzle. To resolve this issue, Math Circus – Act 1 should have placed a labeled continue button in the middle of the screen, after the user has successfully completed a puzzle.
Another issue that this program has is that there is no counter to determine how close the user is to completing the current level. Often times during game play I wondered how many puzzles were left for this game to be completed. It is important to note that this option might be available in the full student version.

An area that Math Circus – Act 1 successfully tackles is gender and multiculturalism issues. By having animals play the characters in their game, there is no partial biased to either gender or culture. Thus, in regards to these areas, all students should feel comfortable interacting with these games.

Surprisingly a major drawback to this program is its absence of help for the user. In the practice version, the program did not incorporate any type of help button in its navigational bar that would be able to explain/provide some helpful hits to the user to complete a puzzle. Likewise, there is no form of online support for either the student or the teacher.

In terms of motivation, as stated earlier, the game does incorporate lively colours and music that are fun, inviting, and reflect its circus theme. Simple animations as well as graphics are also utilized in a constructive manner. Separate audio files are played, when a user successfully completes a puzzle.

The above elements helpfully motivate the user to complete the puzzle, however I believe more could be done. For instance, a future motivational technique that this program could utilize would be a secret circus animal picture that slowly is revealed as the user successfully progresses through each puzzle. Another future motivational technique would include an animation of animals that are involved in the puzzle. This animation would be played upon the user’s completion of the game.

Another unique topic of Math Circus – Act 1, is its correction of mistakes for the user. This program will not allow a user to advance to the next puzzle until the user successfully answers the current puzzle. This allows the user to work on correcting their mistakes until they acquire the correct answer.

Although during this evaluation process I was not able to log in as a teacher, I have been told by fellow teachers that the record keeping component of Math Circus – Act 1 can be used to see student completion of the various games and levels of activities in each. In the teacher component the following options are available: inspect a circus (results of one student), delete a circus (a student’s name), delete all circuses (all students’ names), change settings (music, sound, levels of difficulty, scanning time), and place a

password on teacher utilities.

Math Circus – Act 1 adequately coincides with the Ontario Curriculum for a variety of grade levels. For instance, in the Seal Balance game which requires arranging coloured balls in the correct order to match the bases on which they sit, the Grade 7 expectation for patterning and Algebra is adhered to. Likewise the Grade 8 expectation for number sense and numeration is met with the Balancing Cyclists game, where students balance the numbers on an integer line. As well, the Ticket Sales game, which requires the users to fill in the missing numbers to balance equations, incorporates the Grade 6 expectations for number sense and numeration.

One of the biggest drawbacks for this program has to be the issue of it being modern. Math Circus – Act 1 was made in 1993 and its presence in animations and sounds need to be updated. A suggestion was made earlier on how to incorporate animations as a motivational factor for students. The inclusions of additional animations could be useful to help students’ comprehension of the material at hand, and update the entire software as being modern.
In terms of sound, Math Circus – Act 1 utilizes a computer generated speech reader that helps students read game instructions. This robotic voice is quite horrid, and passé. Often times the background music drowned out this voice, which made it even more difficult to understand what was being spoken. Students who are at the primary age are just acquiring the skill of language, and therefore their minds are impressionable. They should not be subjected to indirectly learning how to speak from this type of robotic voice. In today’s digital age there are more realistic speech reader programs that would be advantageous for Math Circus – Act 1.

Math Circus – Act 1 has been a successful educational software tool for many years. Its strengths lie in being gender/culturally neutral, allowing users to correct their mistakes, allowing teachers to have an enormous amount of control in the assessment of their students’ work, and how it adequately coincides with the Ontario Curriculum for a variety of grade levels. The areas of user friendliness, help, motivation and being modern need to be addressed by this program. Once these issues are address, Math Circus – Act 1 may in fact be the most comprehensive educational software tool on the market. For now, this program receives 20/24.

My Rubric Topic Ideas

System Requirements – RAM , Computer Graphics Card, PC/MAC, Internet connectivity, CD/DVD ROM, printer, scanner, mouse, speakers

Ease of installation - machine crashes or lock-ups

Ease of initial use

Interactivity – How do students interact? (keyboard, mouse, touch screen, scanner, etc.)

Educational Vaue

Content value - Is the design educationally sound?

Methodology appropriateness - Is the methodology employed appropriate for teaching the featured material?

Is it gender-neutral?

Truth in packaging - Was it what you thought it would be?

Value as an independent activity?

Value to child’s education?

Purchase Value - Would you recommend it?Is it appropriate for remedial education, accelerated studies or for gifted children?Does it achieve its educational goals?

Some Rubric Sites

Rubrics for Evaluating Educational Software
Compiled by Prof. Jon Kahl

Ohio SchoolNet Plus Software Evaluation Protocol www.enc.org/rf/ssrp/docs/ssrpinst.htm Highly comprehensive protocol

The Review Corner - Software Evaluation Form www.geocities.com/~reviewcorner/softwareevaluation.htmlMinimal protocol

Southern Illinois University Software Evaluation Form leader.soed.siue.edu/Evaluations/EvalForm.html

The Piano Education Page - Software Reviewers' Checklist www.unm.edu/~loritaf/pnorevck.html

Children's Software Revue - Software Evaluation Instrument www.microweb.com/pepsite/Revue/evaluation.html

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction - Software Review Criteria www.evalutech.sreb.org/criteria/criteri1.htm

SuperKids Software Review Forms:for parents: www.superkids.com/aweb/pages/reviews/parent.html for teachers: www.superkids.com/aweb/pages/reviews/teacher.html for kids: www.superkids.com/aweb/pages/reviews/kids.html

Online Learning: E-Portfolios

Tech Learning has a interesting article on Digital-Age Assessment. They believe that e-portfolios (electronic portfolios) are better at assessing students' progress in school compared to the traditional forms of assessment. They defined an e-portfolio as “a purposefully limited collection of student selected work over time that documents progress toward meeting the standards. Work may be collected over a semester, a year, or even several years, passing from one grade level and teacher to the next.”

The article addressed some of the benefits of using e-portfolios. One of the benefits that I found most significant was e-portfolios allow self-assessment to becoming a regular part of student learning as students are required to frequently select or re-evaluate which of their work is the best evidence of their skills. This also causes the students to strive to work harder in future assignments. They also noted that formative assessment also plays a key role through regular teacher feedback.

The article did address some disadvantages, such as there being no management aspect—“a teacher cannot compare how well all students have done on a certain standard without manually checking each e-portfolio. Therefore, program evaluation becomes very time-consuming.”
However, the disadvantage that I was quite surprised about was the student e-portfolios not being cumulative from year to year. In other words, teachers cannot see a growth on the standards over several years in a single e-portfolio. I’m a bit confused as earlier in the article it noted that “Work may be collected over a semester, a year, or even several years, passing from one grade level and teacher to the next.”

The major benefit of e-portfolios was to be able to assess a students learning progress through a duration of time. It’s disappointing that this duration of time is somewhat limited.
The article did not fully state why e-portfolios are more beneficial than even the traditional portfolios. It did mention that artifacts can be in the form of text, image, video, or other digital content.

Online Learning

One of the Cons of online learning has to be how information can easily be misinterpreted. For instance, in one of my classes in University our group was corresponding to each other via the First Class Network (very similar to WebCT). A lady in our group capitalized every word in her messages. In the social edict of the computer world, capitalizing words is used to show anger. This lady did not know that rule. There was a situation where she replied to someone’s post, and her message was misinterpreted.

There are many other form of misinterpretation in the online world. Although initialisms do not apply to the classroom setting, they do exist and continues to grow in the online world. According to Wikipedia, the list of initialisms "grows by the month and they are collected along with emoticons and smileys into folk dictionaries which are circulated informally amongst users of Usenet, IRC, , and other forms of (textual) computer-mediated communication.”

I am not a user of initialisms, however in the odd e-mail I do receive at last one or two of them and am left to ponder what they mean.

A Reply to Shane

Hi Shane,

That was a very interesting article that you selected. As to the issue you raised about online learning catering to different types of learners, in my opinion, these issues are being addressed to a degree. As Juilia from our class mentioned, many boards are already using voice recognition technology with people with learning disabilities. Her board uses a voice recognition software program (Dragon Naturally Speaking) to type for students as they speak. If this technology works for computer software that is offline, I believe it’s a matter of time for it to work on the online category as well.

Also, for the visual learners videos can be recorded and viewed online. In teacher’s college we had a course where students had to view supplementary video tutorials online.

Bill Gates has stated that he will focus on technology in education when he leaves Microsoft this year (among other things). Gates helped spear Microsoft’s software Surface, will allows people to interact with computers using sight, sound, and touch. I’m sure he’ll eventually incorporate this into his new focus on education.

Re: Facebook....Facebook....Facebook

Wow! Vanessa, that’s a situation that I dread. I would not want my students to find me on Facebook because it would break that professional barrier that we have a teacher – student. I have a friend who is a high school teacher who freely adds his students to his My Space/Facebook page. He does not post anything that would not be deemed inappropriate on the sites, rather he uses it as a form to get to know his students a bit more. His profile setting are air-tight, and he constantly monitors each site. For me, Facebook/MySpace is a place for me to interact with my friends/colleges.

By the way, you handled that question very well. I’ll keep that in mind if I encounter that situation.

Facebook......Facebook........Facebook

I think the reason there is a fascination among teens for Facebook is because teens (and many adults) are still trying to find an identity, and being online lets you be whoever you want. Teens are able to express themselves in ways that they otherwise would not be able to in a more structured social setting like school.

For example, a teen that is into comic books might not be expressive in front of teens that are into sports/other popular groups in school. However, this teen might have a huge following online. Another example would be people who might be too shy to interact with real people in person, but behind a computer screen they don't have to worry about what they look like etc.

Another reason I think there is a fascination among teens, is facebook allows the user (teen) to self glorify themselves/stand out amongst the crowd. High School is all about popularity, and sites such as these can objectify the person as who they want to be/the image that the want to send out to people (through pictures, video, text, or even the amount of friends that they have). All of this is just a way to portray themselves as being popular.

As Shane was mentioning in an earlier post, the popularity for these sites is different among ages groups. For people in the young professional age group, it's purpose is more for reconnecting with lost friends, meeting new people, and even dating. Yet, there are some of us that still do hold on to that “popularity thing”.

Class Notes For Week 2

I just finished reading the class notes for this week. Below are some stats that I found pretty interesting.

"The highest percentage of courses offered online are computer courses, followed by business courses."

I’m not surprised by that statistic. What is quite unique is that each student is simultaneously having a virtual/hands on learning experience.

I was also puzzled about the term “just in time learning.” Thanks for posting that link, because it did clear up this matter.

"Streaming audio and video will be in 80% of North American offices by 2002."

I find that number to be way too high even for last year. Does this refer to availability or actual usage?

Blogging: Being Redefined

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22531543/
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/


Last week Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was interviewed during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Gates made some interesting comments such as the realm of the digital world would soon be changing. “We are at the dawn of a new digital decade, Mr. Gates said. While the last decade of computing was driven by the keyboard and the mouse, the new frontier will be about more human ways of interacting with computers, from touch screens, to motion sensors and speech recognition technology.” In a different article, Gates was quoted “the keyboard and mouse will be a thing of the past”.

I wonder how this will affect the world of blogging, and more specifically blogging and education. I believe the term ‘blogging’ would have to be redefined to incorporate the many forms of the new technology. People would no longer poster their comments to each other using just text and pictures. They would now be able to further incorporate the sense of touch, smell (which has been rumored to be developed by MS), and sound.

All students would greatly benefit from this new form of technology. In particular students who have certain learning disabilities would have more options available to them that would be able to adapt to their needs.

At the primary level, visual learners would be able to trace out letters using solely their hands and receive imitate feedback. At the senior levels, simple science experiments could be conducted numerous times on-line at school and at home. These new tactile methods of learning would greatly aid in comprehension and reinforcement of the learning material.

Gates has stated that he will soon retire this year, and spend his time working on special software projects, that include education initiatives.

I understand that implementing this type of technology into our educational system will take a long time, but I am excited for this new digital age and the possibilities it holds.

Blogging Writing Tools

Came across this during my browing the web. Could be useful for the future.


Blog Writing Tools
Blogger.com - free, host on your server or theirs with advertisements
Easyjournal - free
Tribe.net - free
Crimson Blog - free, but might include pop ups
weblogger.com - not free
Radio UserLand - desktop software you buy - requires some server space for publishing
TypePad - not free
Xanga - free basic service

My Reflections

Hello everyone!

This is my first blog. To be honest, this does feel a bit weird in the sense that I am typing a journal/diary that is accessible for anyone to read. However at the same time, this is quite exciting.

I have always been fascinated by technology; mostly because in my life time I’ve seen society’s use of technology drastically increase. In elementary school I remember doing handwriting assignments, and as I progress through my academic career, I experienced the shift to the digital world. This came in a variety of ways from the use of the Internet to research material, to using computers in presentations, being part of on-line discussion boards, and so on.

The use of technology in education is controversial topic. On one side of the equation it allows students to learn in a fun and exploratory environment where many concepts can be reinforced. On the other side it raises the issues of cyber bullying, the actuality of truly enhancing every student’s learning ability, and increasing the disparity with low-income households/schools compared to the norm.

How can we be sure that students are actually learning and not playing on the computer? I guess it depends on the grade level and subject content.

During teacher’s college one of my classes volunteered at a nearby elementary school. Students at this school came from low income level households. The school had a small computer lab and its educational software was quite limited. In contrast, at the same time I was also volunteering at an elementary school in which students came from high income level households. This school was quite rich in terms of resources and technology. I remember a Grade 2 student at this school brought in her own Barbie laptop computer for show and tell. What was even more remarkable was her twin sister had a matching laptop. Surely these students have a competitive advantage against other students, and the gap between the low-income households/schools against the norm widened.

I think technology in the classroom would be good if every child has access to the same technology tools at home, at well as at school.


Michael

Introduction

Web Blog


Hello everyone. My name is Michael Noronha. At the start of this year, I became a member of the OCT. I have never taken an AQ course, let alone an online course. I am currently applying to the Halton Catholic District School Board, as well as to the public board. In the meantime I’m continuing to volunteering with my second placement in St. Gabriel’s school for Grade 1.

With my student teaching, I always tried to incorporate technology into my lessons. For example, during an art lessons where students were to learn about vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, I used a laptop (which was connected to a TV) to show them pictures that contained these types of lines. The pictures were of students’ favorite books, cartoons etc. The students had fun during the lesson, and were able to recognize and remember the content of the lesson.

I am looking forward to learning more about how to use technology in the classroom.

Michael Noronha