Jeff wrote about how a science teacher at his school, Carol Jordan, had her grade 9 students report the results of their science experiments. Instead of the usual formal lab report document, the students either created a YouTube video or a VoiceThread. I have been thinking about having students do lab reports in a different format so it was a very timely post for me! In his post, Jeff has lots of examples of both types of lab ‘reports’ which was incredibly useful to see what the students produced.

Last night I had insomnia, which was the perfect opportunity for me to try out VoiceThread! (With a 4 and a 6 year old where else do you find the time?!) I signed up for an account and created the following VoiceThread which provides information on how to navigate my blog. Lately I’ve had trouble embedding items in this blog, so first here’s the link and now the embedded file:

VoiceThread allows you to upload a variety of files; video, photos, documents etc. You can then comment using audio or video. In true web 2.0 fashion it also allows others to comment on your work, so feel free to comment away on my VoiceThread.

I did have a few technical difficulties with VoiceThread–the program wouldn’t let me edit at times and I somehow ended up with a lot of scribbles on one of my slides–but all in all it was very straight forward. I could see students being able to figure it out and being able to start creating pretty quickly. Unlike SlideShare’s slidecasting, which I posted on here, you record the audio directly on the VoiceThread site. With SlideShare you must produce your audio on your computer, host it on a podcast host, then link your slide show to the podcast host. So a bit more set-up is definitely required with SlideShare. SlideShare slidecasts do have a more professional feel to them, but VoiceThread allows for more interactivity.

VoiceThread also offers EdVoiceThread.com, with is designed for use by teachers and students. It is designed as a safe environment for students to create and comment on each other’s work. They are obviously trying to address the security concerns that some schools and districts have with social networking type sites.

In summary, I think that VoiceThread is a pretty user friendly tool, and I don’t think it would take much to get the students used to it and using it.

Image: Funky Light by Gaetan Lee

This Thursday is our students’ live video conference with Daniel Pink. They’ve finished A Whole New Mind and this is their chance to ask Mr. Pink some questions directly, as well as further discuss the book with their classmates. We’ll have all four classes of students (about 110 or so) in our Forum and will conduct a video Skype call with Mr. Pink.

They also decided to Ustream the discussion and have the live blog discussion hosted on CoverItLive. I caught the post just in time this morning to log onto Ustream. Along with about 80 other viewers I was able to watch (and I could have participated in side discussions) part of the amazing discussion. Some live Ustream talks I have watched were not of very good quality, technically speaking; this was not the case today! It was amazing to hear the mature discussion between the students and Daniel Pink. It was difficult to follow the conversations on CoverItLive as the comments were coming so fast and furious!

Today’s experience really highlights how powerful web 2.0 tools can be in education. The students were totally engaged and clearly understood the key points of Daniel Pink’s book, judging from their questions to the author and the way they were rippin’ it up on CoverItLive. Imagine trying to offer the students (and interested educators) this sort of opportunity without web 2.0 tools.

Thank you Karl Fisch for sharing this experience with other educators; it is really something to aspire to!

Addendum: February 29th–A big thank you to Anne Smith and Maura Moritz, who Karl Fisch pointed out in the comments, are the English 9 teachers who organized the whole learning experience.  And the grade 9 students at Arapahoe High; you really showed people how thoughtful and involved with your learning you are, well done!

The latest tool that I’ve tried is SlideShare’s slidecasting. I’ve seen quite a number of straight slide shows on SlideShare, but it was only recently that I played a slidecast. What is a slidecast? A slidecast is when your slides are synched to audio. It has the power of video, but is much simpler to make and the visual quality is excellent! In addition when you are watching the slidecast you can skip ahead to the slide you’re interested in and the audio is still synched. At the bottom of the slidecast you can see how much audio goes with each slide.

To learn how to make your own slidecast, check out Jonathan Boutelle’s slidecast. In addition to Jonathan’s info, the following might help. To make your slidecast, you upload your slides to SlideShare and your audio to a podcasting host. In Slideshare you provide the url for your audio. One of the things that I found difficult was locating the url for my mp3 file. I still don’t know how to find the url for the audio I uploaded to Gcast. I eventually loaded my mp3 file to Internet Archive. When you click on your audio file in Internet Archive you get a screen that looks like the image below. I’ve indicated in the image where you find out the url for your mp3 file.

I decided to make my first slidecast using a Google Docs presentation I did for my Science 9 on-line class. It is on cell division. The slides were not geared to slidecasting, and have far more text than is necessary. I’ve never podcasted before, so there are definite problems with the audio–it is very quiet and there are no intros, outros or music of any kind. In the spirit of sharing though (see Shareski–Lesson #1 Share), here’s my slidecast, warts and all.

[slideshare id=276642&doc=copy-of-sci-feb-20-1203656309380038-3&w=425]

| View | Upload your own

In case the embedded slidecast doesn’t work, here’s the link.

One way to use slidecasting would be to prepare mini-lessons that can be posted on-line for students to access on an as needed basis. They could also come in handy on those days you require a substitute teacher People can comment on slidecasts that you post to SlideShare. If students did projects involving slidecasting, their peers could view and leave comments. I could see using this to get students to make their own slidecasts to explain concepts.

I’m excited about slidecasting because it is relatively straightforward to produce, it has the power of video, the image quality is great, and all the tools are free! If you haven’t tried it before, give it a look-see and maybe you’ll add it to your list of tools to try.

In the Internet age, we end up with the Internet Me, a personal news source where we only hear people who think the same way that we do.

It has gotten me thinking about my own situation. Let’s look at the news sources I consume. I use iGoogle where I have 4 news feed widgets, but 3 of them are from the same news source, the CBC. I also listen to CBC radio and watch the CBC national news. Not a lot of diverse view points there. Living in a smaller town (Penticton, population approx. 20,000) I have limited choices when it comes to radio; it’s CBC, a few cheesy local stations and sometimes I can get NPR. My choices with television news are equally limited since we went cable/satelight free 3 years ago (that’s another post in itself). It becomes clear to me that I need to diversify with my internet news feeds, because that is where I really have choice. I may not agree with the view point of certain media outlets, but they offer an insight into what other folks are thinking about current events.

In Michele Martin’s recent post Living in a Blogging Box and How to Get Out of It she talks about how easy it is to end up with limited viewpoints:

The problem with blogging in our comfort zones, though, is that we narrow the possibilities for learning and creativity that come from exposing ourselves to new and different perspectives. If I stay in the edu-blogger community or the technology community of bloggers, with little contact with anyone else, it’s easy to get sucked into the sort of group-think that naturally evolves when any community of people comes together.

As a newbie blogger, I built up my blog subscriptions as one might expect. I’d find some influencial blogs, in my case Clay Burell’s Beyond School and Sue Waters’ Mobile Technology in TAFE. If their posts linked to other blogs I would check them out, and if I liked them, I would subscribe. I’d also read the comments after their posts and if I liked what someone wrote, I’d check them out and maybe start subscribing to them. What I’m finding now is that I’m often reading the same people. I might be reading Dean Shareski’s blog, but many of the people commenting are already in my feed reader, which isn’t surprising considering how I got my subscriptions.

I’ve also noticed that with most of the blogs I read that there are very few dissenting opinions in the comments. Notice I didn’t say no dissenting views. So my strategy on subscribing to blogs is letting me down in that I’m not being exposed to alternate views. This is not to say that I’m not learning a lot–I am!

My goal for the next few weeks is move from my ‘Me Vision’ to ‘We Vision’. I’m going to add some different media outlets to my news reader. I’m also going to follow some of Michele Martin’s suggestions and try to diversify my blog subscriptions with the help of Google Alerts and StumbleUpon. Hopefully I’ll avoid group think and possibly get more exposure for my blog

Are you concerned that your ‘world view’ is too narrow? Are you seeing the downsides of ‘Internet Me’? What are you doing to expand your vision? I’d love to hear your strategies.

Image: Day 296: Boxed In by Mrs. Maze