Saturday, October 6, 2007

tt4t_006 School 2.0 – Teacher Tools for the net generation - Episode 6

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It’s Saturday October 6, 2007 and welcome to Episode 6 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers. It is the end of another very busy week and yesterday’s Regional Office of Education Fall Classic Professional Development Conference was a huge success. Thanks goes out to all the ROE 11 folks that organized the conference and congratulations on another well attended conference! I want to thank everyone that attended my sessions on School 2.0 yesterday and offer a bit of a follow-up. As promised a link is provided in the show notes to my PowerPoint as it was presented. (School 2.0 PowerPoint)The technologies discussed yesterday now enable the continuation of the conversation and can offer more detail to the topics discussed for those interested. One of the negatives of a face-to-face conference format is that you typically only have 50 minutes to present your material and you are then finished. Limiting a School 2.0 conversation to 50 minutes is really an impossible task so I tried to give an overall view of the technologies and where I think we are headed with the adoption of these technologies in schools. I also tried to break yesterdays’ presentation into about a 50/50 mix of lecture and question time for discussion. The Student Response Systems used during the presentation gave the group immediate feedback about the audience response to the questions about blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 technologies.

If you are interested in participating and leaving a comment in this blog you may click on the Comments feature located at the bottom of this post and leave a comment. As I mentioned yesterday the comments feature on this blog is moderated by me and therefore when you leave a comment it must be approved by me before it is posted for the world to see. That is the educator in me wanting to ensure that no inappropriate comments with profanity or something else inappropriate gets posted. Blogger also requires you to type in random letters when you post your comments to ensure that blogs do not get spammed by bot-like programs that generate automated messages. This is all for the protection of the blog owner to protect the integrity of the blog. This is not meant to deter you from commenting so please contribute so that we can all learn together. As I mentioned yesterday this is an excellent informal way to continue professional development activities. If you have a resource you would like to share or a question or comment you may also email me at techtalk@eiu.edu

Tom’s Technology Pick of the Week
It’s time for Tom’s Technology Pick of the Week this week I would like to highlight a couple of educational podcasts at the K-12 level that demonstrate the possibilities of the power of an audio delivered format.


The first site I would like to share is Radio Willow Web and is produced by Elementary students. Here is a description from their website“ Radio WillowWeb is a podcast for kids and by kids from the students at Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha, Nebraska. Each new show is called a Willowcast. Each Willowcast can be heard on WillowWeb as an mp3 digital audio file.”

http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/radio/


The second example I would like to share is a blog/podcast combination from 8th grade American History teacher Eric Langhorst of Missouri and offers an example of how teachers can incorporate this technology into the classroom experience.

http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com/

Links are provided in the Show Notes for Episode 6 of Tech Talk 4 Teachers and can be found at techtalk4teachers.blogspot.com Be sure to check them out for ideas on how you can use this type of technology in your classroom.


That wraps it up for another episode for this week so until next time this is Tom Grissom, keep on learning.

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