I’m sitting in a meeting in an 8th Grade English classroom right now. I grabbed Born Confused by Tanuja Desai Hidier off the shelf, which I haven’t read. Here goes:

“And I wiggled my sack onto my back and walked on.”

We had our first meeting today, and while I was thrilled to see that 12 kids showed up, I was somewhat disappointed that none of them were girls. In any event, the boys were eager to get started recording podcasts today and I had to pull back the reins a bit as we had some decisions to make. Were we blogging and podcasting or just podcasting? Was this a blog about life at school or about life in general? Was the target audience the whole world or just the MCDS community? Would each podcast episode have several segments, or would each group/topic do a separate podcast? How would we preserve the students’ anonymity?

In any event, I asked the kids how many of them had already blogged or podcasted outside of school. About 5 hands went up. The subject matter on their blogs ranged from movies to music to skiing. They divided themselves into 3 groups of 4 and got to work right away, and their emphases will be Music, Humor and Movies. This has the potential to be pretty cool.

Our home will be: http://www.mcdsblogs.org/blogclub and I’ll be sure to post updates on our progress.

http://k12online.wm.edu/its_elementary/player.html

If you attended today’s session, please be sure to leave a comment letting us all know how you’re intending to use blogs & podcasts in your schools. And once you’ve gotten one set up, be sure to let us know how to find you!

You can download a .pdf (with links) of my presentation (updated as of 8/07) here:
Hello World!

http://www.mcdsblogs.org/trout

http://room12.edublogs.org/

1. Banyan Room

2. Maple Room

3. Huckleberry Room

To give a listen to the kids’ work (which I must say, sounds fabulous!) go to any of the 3 class sites below:

• Huckleberry Room
• Banyan Room
• Maple Room

The iRiver is my new best friend. I’m impressed with the sound quality, ease of use and storage capacity. Less impressed so far with the Snowball USB mic we just got, but I’ve admittedly only just started playing with it.

Each Spring, the MCDS 1st Graders host the First Grade Library as a culminating project to celebrate their collective growth as readers and writers. Students hand write a series of stories, edit the stories, type them into a PowerPoint template I’ve created for the project, print the stories out, illustrate each page and bind them. Then parents and students fr

om other grade levels peruse the “library” of stories and check stories out to read and write reviews.

This year, we decided to add an audio component to the project. Each student will pick a favorite story and we will record them reading the story. The plan is to burn a CD of stories for each class, and to hopefully create a podcast of the stories that the larger community can enjoy.

I’m experimenting with our new iRiver T30, which I absolutely love in some ways, but is turning out to be a lot less M

ac-friendly than we had been led to believe. (MP3 files won’t import directly into GarageBand — Audacity is needed as a go-between.) In order to upload the kids’ audio, I’m doing a rather convoluted set of steps which I would love feedback on — I actually have no idea if this is the best way to do it. It is definitely NOT simple, and there’s no way that I’d ask a classroom teacher to do this for him/herself. So here are my steps:

1. Record students reading their stories onto the iRiver (I thought about adding an external mic, but the sound quality w as practically identical.)
2. Drag the mp3 files off the iRiver onto my iMac desktop
3. Open the files in Audacity and edit out the stuff I don’t want. Export the files as an mp3 or wav file. I’m doing it this way because GarageBand won’t recognize the mp3s directly off the iRiver.
4. Import the Audacity-created mp3s into GarageBand. Add jingle music ot beginning and end of stories. Use the Share Podcast command and save the mu4 file to my desktop
5. Upload the mu4 file to my archive.org account (I won’t even MENTION how cumbersome that process is!!)
6. Create a blog entry in the class edublogs blog with a link to each individual podcast
7. Burn a feed for the blog using feedburner
8. Publicize

I have only done 3 files so far, and it was really time consuming and a lot of steps. To hear what I’ve done so far, go to http://huckleberry.edublogs.org or to http://feeds.feedburner.com/huckleberry and see if you can get it to work.
Click here to hear my maiden attempt at uploading audio to archive.org before I had the kids do any recording.

So really — world — I’d love any advice about how to simplify this project and how to keep it relatively inexpensive and teacher-friendly.

Thanks in advance and I’ll be sure to post more about this as the project progresses.

Blogs We’re Reading, Podcasts We’re Listening To and Tools We’re Playing With:
As an informal mixer/warm-up to the topic, I asked everyone at the beginning of the meeting to introduce themselves, the schools they were from, and if appropriate, a favorite Web 2.0 resource they are currently using. This is the list of resources mentioned (be sure to add others as a comment below!):

1. Jon Udell’s Weblog
2. Knitting Blog
3. Moodle
4. Plone
5. Home Brewing podcasts
6. Daily Kos
7. Flickr
8. del.icio.us
9. Psychology podcasts
10. NY Times podcasts
11. eHub
12. Mozilla Sunbird
13. SF Chronicle Tech Talk Podcast
14. Poker podcasts
15. Blue Frontier
16. boingboing.net
17. Edublogs
18. Learnerblogs
19. ESLBlogs
20. Class Blogmeister
21. How to set up a student centered classroom blog

Visual Search Engines:
Our first presenter was Angela Neff, Director of Technology at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, who gave us a brief overview of what Web 2.0 is, with comparisons to various Web 1.0 tools and websites. She then presented a host of visual search engines and challenged us to break (or at least examine) the Google habit by experimenting with some of the cool tools listed below:

1. KarTOO
2. Mooter
3. Clusty
4. Grokker
5. Ujiko
6. Ditto.com

Podcasting:
The next presenter was Jason Stone, Director of Technology at San Francisco Day School, who spoke about how his 5th grade Spanish teachers and students have been experimenting with podcasting as a wonderful extension of the Spanish curriculum. While SFDS have been able to post MP3s to the website for years, they are excited about how podcasting lets users subscribe through aggregator (most students use iTunes). By using a stand-alone MP3 recorder, recording becomes really easy and not dependent on having a laptop handy. With the newest version of iLife, GarageBand makes podcasting really simple and Apple has a really good tutorial on creating and posting a podcast.

Plone Content Management Software for School Websites:
Next up was Preston Tucker from The College Preparatory School in Oakland. He took us through the stages of growth and development their school’s website has gone through over the years. As their original website grew, it slowly became un-navigable and untenable with over 600 separate pages, until finally his school asked him to move the website from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 structure. After studying and analyzing many other school websites, they decided to use Plone, an open-source CMS, to develop their new site. Some of the key advantages to their new site include:

1. Calendars, pictures, and news are now easily brought to the front of the site
2. If the school changes it’s branding, logo, colors, etc. it is easy to change
3. Searching and using the site mirrors an analogy of the simplicity of Google, rather than the drilling down through the links like Yahoo
4. Non-technical users put their information, documents, photos, etc. into forms that are controlled centrally and viewable by any browser
5. Students now beginning to be webmasters
6. Plone has a number of out-of-the-box import/export features for various document types

Using Moodle Course Management for a School Website:
Richard Kassissieh from San Francsico University High School was up next to talk about how UHS has moved from using WebCT to Moodle for many of their course listings and teacher interactions with students. He has made it easy for us to review his presentation by posting an outline of it here. I also mentioned the Moodle that is being built by the New York Consortium of Independent School Technologists (NY’s equivalent of BAISNET) and how it might be an interesting model for us to consider as well. Richard also spoke eloquently about the importance of teacher blogging, how it changes writing, how we ought to visit and support each other’s blogs, and how the voices of those of us who work directly in schools need to be added to the edublogosphere (which is already well represented by ed tech consultants.) Visit (and leave a comment on) Richard’s blog when you have a minute! If you have a blog of your own, please leave the URL in a comment below or email the info to BAISNet.

Talking to Students About MySpace:
We ended the BAISNet portion of the meeting with a presentation by Brad Lakritz from Marin Academy. He recreated a presentation he recently delivered to 9th and 10th graders at his school as part of a larger panel (including older MA students) on the topic of MySpace. One especially salient point was that he equated Web 2.0 technologies as being the “reality internet” outcropping of the reality TV shows, including many very real dangers and pitfalls. His school consciously made the decision to arm students with information and statistics about web usage and the public nature of MySpace, rather than using scare tactics. He gave the example of how his 16-year old daughter felt that giving him access to her MySpace account felt as though he was listening in on her private phone calls, yet she failed to understand just how very public her online communication was indeed.

At Least They Brought Yummy Food…
MCDS has been experimenting with inviting various vendors to school to deliver some of our professional development to teachers. Following the meeting we invited a vendor to present to BAISNet and some of our own faculty and…well…let’s just say that it was not a very effective presentation. Thanks for those of you who managed to sit there for what felt (to me) like an eternity. Personally, I vote for keeping BAISNet meetings BAISNet meetings. ‘Nuff said.

Conclusion:
Thanks to the wonderful presenters and to all of you who braved the rainy weather this afternoon! If you weren’t able to attend or are reading this entry from parts unknown, please feel free to add to our lists of resources, ask questions, leave comments, etc.

I always had a basic aversion to this concept, holding tight to the idea that teacher training is highly customized and personal, and is best performed by fellow teacher-types rather than by someone with a product to sell. Even though I have spent various parts of my career making a living as an educational technology consultant and as a technology speaker at a larger company, I still always saw myself as a teacher of teachers rather than as a vendor pushing a product.

At Macworld this year, I was struck by how many of the big vendor booths featured dynamic, engaging software trainers who did an excellent job of showcasing the various products and their features. While this type of training is obviously sales-oriented, perhaps there is a place for it in schools — especially if it is free-of-charge. My thinking is that once in a while it might be exciting for teachers to be dazzled by what’s out there, and to be given an opportunity to check out the latest and greatest stuff without attending a trade show.

Since Macworld, we invited our local Apple rep to host an “Introduction to Podcasting” workshop afterschool in our computer lab. This 2-hour presentation was not hands-on, however the presenter provided the teachers with an excellent overview of some of the terrific school and classroom podcasts out there, a list of rationales for podcasting and a very thorough step-by-step interactive presentation of how to use GarageBand in conjunction with Keynote, iTunes and a .mac account to easily publish podcasts. And Apple even provided the soda, pretzels and cookies! We invited colleagues from several neighboring schools, so the added benefit was the opportunity to build connections with other teachers in the area. Yes, it was a little bit “commercially” at times, but the good will created by the Apple folks, and the excitement they generated with the participants made it a real win-win situation.

On Friday, I attended another Apple-sponsored event at Del Mar School in Tiburon, CA, to hear about their 5-month old 1:1 laptop program for 6-8 graders. The focus was entirely on student learning, faculty innovation, parent excitement and the nuts and bolts of how to get a 1:1 program off the ground. Apple provided a beautiful lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant, the event provided a glimpse into a neighboring school demonstrating what’s possible, and attendees were given a fantasting networking and brainstorming forum free-of-charge. Teachers at Del Mar spoke glowingly of their participation in an every-other-year intensive Vanguard training program they can attend through Apple as well.

Next up, Gateway. Around 10 of our faculty members (including me) have been piloting the latest Gateway tablet pc laptops. We have invited all of the technology leaders from local independent schools and our neighboring public schools to come to an afternoon presentation from Gateway about teaching and learning with tablets on March 16th. I’ll report back after the presentation. The agenda looks great, and so far the only difference is that while the Gateway reps have offered to pay for the snacks, we have to go out and buy them!

“Portfolios and documentation in the classroom are used to tell a story of a child’s life at school. This story is told through multiple perspectives (teacher/child/family), and is supported with a variety of work samplings, transcriptions, and other documentation types.

Several goals are attained through the thorough, thoughtful, and successful use of a well-planned portfolio and documentation process. These are:

• A child’s developmental progress is charted over time, and this aids in revealing their quality of thinking and skill level. Documentation is an authentic assessment tool that aids our assessment of the child’s experiences, and provides an opportunity for each child to self-assess their involvement and goals.

• Parents become more connected to work of their children. Documentation reflects the classroom experience to the outside observer, and shows the respect we hold for this work. Further, it gives parents and others a glimpse of the child’s involvement in project work, social relationships, and their use of the classroom environment.

• Documentation, portfolio development, and work sampling help us to make more informed curriculum decisions. It highlights activities that provide successes, and helps us to identify needs and areas to develop. It reflects accountability on all levels.”

Debra goes on to enumerate the different types of documentation that can be used for student portfolios, including narratives, transcriptions, photographs, observations, products and work samples, self-reflections, webbing, video and tapes.

I have seen Debra and her colleagues employ technology to help document their classroom experiences through extensive use of the digital camera, voice recordings, daily emails home to parents encapsulating that day’s activities, scanning student work, videotaping big events, and using word processors to type up enormous amounts of hand-written and recorded transcripts from student interviews.

I think that once most teachers learn about classroom documentation, they clearly see the value in it and would love to send their students home not just with completed “products” (research papers, artwork, etc.) but with a description of the process used to arrive at the product. But the inevitable question is how exactly are teachers supposed to find the time and wherewithal to pull it off?

I’ve been experimenting with using a combination of a digital camera and a PowerPoint template on my laptop to try to capture classes in the Computer Lab as they are happening. The template has a variety of ready-to-go slides with 1, 2, 4 or 6 picture placeholders and text boxes underneath them. I run around during class, capturing students at work with my camera. Then I put my camera aside and move around the room with my laptop and template. I interview kids as they work, asking open-ended questions like “how did you decide how to make this?” or “what is the hardest thing about this project?” while I type their responses into the template. After class I bring the photos in to the template, matching up the kids to their quotes. Then I can print out the documentation to display on the wall or email the whole thing home to parents. But I have to say, it takes a lot of steps and I couldn’t pull it off without other teachers in the room.

There’s always voice recordings or video cameras to help with this process of classroom documentation. But again, who has time on a regular basis to pull the sound into a movie or to edit the video into iMovie during their regular teaching life?

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the various ways teachers and students can use Web 2.0 tools to document the process of student (and teacher) learning. Blogs and podcasts seem like excellent ways for learners to reflect, experiment and to evolve in front of a larger audience. I hope to work with some of our teachers in the coming months to begin experimenting with these newer forms of documentation.

An administrator once gave me some great advice, saying that not every classroom endeavor has to be a “gourmet meal.” That if you have one or two gourmet meals every once in a while, you’ll appreciate them more. Most of the time classroom “meals” end up being nourishing, healthy and perfectly fine, but nothing too fancy. Maybe the goal of using different documentation techniques should be to showcase an occasional gourmet meal that shows, rather than tells what is going on in our classrooms and inside the heads of our students.

I used my commute to listen to the EdTechTalk#25 podcast with guests David Warlick and Terry Freedman. While much of the conversation was similar to the recent MacWorld presentation I had just heard David give, there were some great impromptu moments during the conversation. At one point, Terry spoke about an initiative in the U.K. where, he fears, great resources are being put into designing state-of-the-art classrooms for yesterday’s students. There was also great discussion about the current obsession with standards and with students learning discreet skills and bodies of information right at the very time where learning how to learn and what is important factual information is more important than having amassed a set of knowledge predetermined by educators and politicians.

The phrase “shallow standards” came up during the podcast. It really struck a chord with me and reminded me of our wonderful visit to Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA last Spring, where we were able to observe their wonderful concept of “Central Subjects” for each grade level. By focusing on one, unifying, cross-curricular subject for an entire grade level, teachers had the freedom to go deeper with their essential questions, to take their time, to understand each unique group of learners and teacher they had each year. What a wonderful model they provide, free from the shackles of standards, coverage of a huge amount of content and from the old “but I’ve always done it that way.”