Hands On Support in Shropshire

Wow, WHAT a day! Keith Havercroft asked me to do a spot on podcasting at his music conference and I gladly accepted. In two sessions of an hour and a half each we looked at using Audacity to create podcasts. Well, you can’t really do a world-class production in the time available but judging by the amount of concentration going on, delegates gained a lot from the support and defied the odds to produce some fine intro files for podcasts, publishing them at lopcast.ethink.org.uk. Anyone looking for helpfiles should try here. I’ll do some more over the summer. Examples of blogs and podcasts we looked at were Hope School’s, Mary Webb School’s and Oldbury Wells‘. We touched on issues of pupils having a worldwide audience for their work, pupil motivation and peer review but really the session was about getting hands-on and creating something.
We used Audio Networks for the pre-recorded soundfiles, a superb resource negotiated to be free when used within the RBC. We looked at issues of licensing and copyright and I pointed people towards the Creative Commons site for further clarification than I could give.

I’m hoping that we see some more eThink blogs appearing as the delegates and their pupils start to reap the learning benefits of blogging and podcasting.

For my own Personal Software Challenge, I used Cool Timer for the first time to set time limits for exercises.  What fun!  I hear Mrs Brown is using it in lessons too and she uses different soundfiles for the alarm!  What fun it must be in those lessons.

So what on earth is a blog? How can we use blogs to enhance learning opportunities? A number of people have made great and erudite pronouncements on the uses of blogs (Will Richardson, Alan Levine, Anne Davis , Ewan McIntosh to name but a few) but how might we use them in our educational situation?

Perhaps by training learners to express themselves better, or to draw connections to develop better understanding of meaning?

Click “comment” below and make your pronouncement, or even trackback from your own blog. Define blogging (here are some ideas) and suggest what you think might make a blog good for learning.

Here are some examples:

Ellie’s Grade 7 Maths blog

Improving Writing at JHH

A mathematical conversation

Meole Brace English Department had a twilight this evening with the brief of looking at effective interactive technology use in the English classroom. After a hard day’s work, the delegates continued working hard into the evening through varied exercises and discussion on the ways that whiteboard and presentation technology can be used in the English classroom.

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The word is spreading about blogging. I introduced the concept to some heads of department today and they were very interested in using blogs in a number of ways. It’s about time that the read/write web came into the popular consciousness, where people can start using it in innovative ways to enhance learning. Topics we discussed today included the use of blogs for pupils to interact with their learning materials in new ways, and the benefits and inherent dangers of allowing a public publishing medium.

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