Kingdom FM will be having part of its schedule planned, recorded and broadcast by school students from around Fife, after they won their regional Radiowaves Kingdom FM competition.
Winners Kirkcaldy High School and Carleton Primary School form part of the Fife Radiowaves service, bringing together 121 student-run podcast stations, covering every area of school life and the life of young people today.
In the light of some more work being done as a result of workshops elsewhere, I’m happy to have been able to update my previous blog posts on:
EdTechRoundup is a new podcast from an open group of UK educators which I have become involved in.
EdTechRoundup is a place where a group of UK-based educators come together for discussion and collaboration around the use of technology in education. We believe in pedagogically-sound uses of educational technology, but don?t believe in ramming Web 2.0 (or anything else for that matter) down people?s throats?
The first podcast is out. This one sees David Noble and Sinclair Mackenzie at the controls with input from Joe Dale. They discuss tools for the classroom including ClassTools.net: Flash Templates for Educators and the problems of online content being blocked in schools. Joe Dale provides his top 5 reasons to use blogs in class or school.
The dual presenter with input from a guest is going to be the pattern for the show with a different set of presenters taking over for each show. A fair number of UK educators are involved (see the edtechroundup » Contact Details page) and the podcast is open to anyone to join in. In good social media fashion the podcast has been organised on a wiki and a series of FlashMeetings. The Meetings are announced on the wiki so it is easy to join in.
Apart for planning the podcast the meetings have been good fun and a lot of interesting areas of tech and social media discussed. If the first show and these discussions are anything to go by EdTechRoundup should be a good feed to add to iTunes or other podcatcher.
Tom Barrett and myself will be hosting the next podcast which should be out in a couple of weeks. Cross posted from John @ Sandaig
As the working week ends at MGS, I found myself present at the Teach-Meet Roadshow featuring digital video, online publishing, digital photography, animation & podcasting. I sampled the podcasting workshop.
An interesting site which David flagged up was find sounds from where little snippets of music and sound can be downloaded to spice up your podcast. Although many of these are very short, Audacity features a Repeat function (in the Effects menu) where you can loop any highlighted sections simply by specifying the desired number of repetitions.
While experimenting with the change tempo* function, it occurred to me that this could be a great way to digest a recorded radio program in less than the required time. It may be that I am simply more hyper than I appear, but I often find the pace of much documentary broadcasting to be a little on the slow side. Pondering this, it struck me that reversing the effect, could be a great asset to Learning Support departments. Alternatively, could a single recording be quickly edited for three different levels in a foreign language class? The following audio files should illustrate the possibilities – the percentage change is a little extreme but is, at least, unmistakable:
Original tempo: Original tempo
20% faster 20% faster
20% slower 20% slower
* The important point here is that the apparently correct option to change speed also changes the pitch – resulting in, at best, distracting comedy.
Great news for technology, great news for languages, great news for Scotland: Coffee Break Spanish producers Mark Pentleton and Kara, have won a European Award for Languages.
More news on this over at the MFLE, and a great video from Mark and Kara that tells the whole story and gives highlights of the rest of Tuesday’s events in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.
Tim Geddes from Glaitness primary school in Kirkwall has highlighted the most recent TV Glaitness video podcast from his school.
The Primary 7 pupils at the school aim to produce one every month. They work together as a team employing a huge range of skills – News Investigators, Script Editors, Presenters, Cameramen, Interviewers, Sound Editors, Film Editors and Web Publishers – and although the outcome is mainly for parents, they learn a great deal and have great fun in producing it.
Tim hopes you enjoy watching it and would welcome feedback.
I am sitting on the train on my way home from Hillside school in Aberdour in Fife having just spent the day on David Noble’s course on Using the Social Web to develop the Four Capacities.
Aberdour is a pretty looking village and we had a nice autumnal view when we took a minute to look out the window.
David took participants through a gament of Web 2.0 tools explained there use in theory and in practise; participants created an edublogs blog, a mp3 recording (which was uploaded to the blog), took part in a flash meeting, explored Flickr, YouTube and discussed many other web tools in a packed day.
Just like you do when we’re listening to David’s booruch podcast, you get the feeling you are in the safe hands of someone who not only has a leading edge grasp of the new technology, but can walk the talk, incorporating the tools in his teaching regularly over an extended period of time. He explained the tools, suggested ways of using them, pointed to good practice and reinforced them with his own practice. I was comforted by his reference to CfE and the four capacities, it looks like some of our efforts to use the social web will support the aims of CfE.
I was particularly interested in the use of Flashmeeting. David had organised a meeting with Lisa from England and it was the first time I had seen Flashmeeting used.
Flashmeeting is a free to education tool supported by the Open University. A browser based video conferencing application, whch includes a shared whiteboard and chat, it reminded me of Marratech which I’ve used in the Glow trials. Flash Meeting seemed to have the edge over Marratech in the video quality and in the fact that it is a flash/browser based application. I hope to be able to use it in school, just need to check to see what protocols it uses and if these are usable on the Glasgow network.
I also enjoyed David’s presentation, instead of powerpoint, David used a series of del.icio.us pages for each segment of the day: tagged with “3Nov1″ on del.icio.us through to tagged with “3Nov7″ on del.icio.us, this method of presentation was obviously very flexible due to a pile of excellent links.
Throughout the day David touch on pupils safety issues in a light way but constantly reminding us of its importance. He is in the unusual position of having services often filtered in Local Authority networks available and has to deal with the risks in a professional manner. This also meant that I could plug my laptop in and be online without any problem.
Hillside School is a residential school for boys aged 11-16 with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. David’s experience made a clear link in my mind between pupil motivation and the four capacities.
David’s work shows that social media will help us both motivate pupils and to help them move towards becoming successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.
(cross-posted at John @ Sandaig)
A CPD opportunity listed at CPDFind
I’ll be attending this great looking opportunity next weekend, it is covering Using the Social Web to develop the Four Capacities and lead by David Noble who of course produces the great Booruch podcast.
I’ve two reasons for posting this information:
Firstly I think this is a great cpd opportunity, the Booruch podcast is the one podcast I have religiously stuck with, David keeps his listeners up to date with a vast amount of new technology as it emerges, but more importantly he has a realistic, classroom based understanding of how to use the technology in teaching and how it fits in with Scottish educational initiatives. Personally I keep up with some of the new tech arriving in my feed reader every day, often have ideas of how to use these in the class (quite a few fail, but Ewan lets me know this is ok). What I am hoping to get from the CPD is more of an idea of how the Social web links to a Curriculum for Excellence. Of couse I can see the links, but I know from listening to Booruch that David will dot the i’s and cross the t’s.
The second interesting this is the CPDFind website (or subsite of LTS). CPDfind is
a database of CPD opportunities from providers all over Scotland.where you can:
- search for CPD using keywords and/or key categories such as leadership and professional skills
- make a wish list of opportunities for your CPD plan
- search for different types of CPD such as professional reading and action research.
The plans for CPDFind are ambitious and include integration with Glow.
I’ve been aware of the CPDFind site for a while but this is the first time I’ve used it in anger, i am very pleased that it uses tag like categories. I wonder if integration with glow will bring user added tags to let the site become CPDFindr.
I know that it is only a week away but if you are interested in Web 2.0/Social web In education I think this is a opportunity that is to good to miss.
Thanks to the kind people at Core-Ed the video and slides of my last ’season’ of talks on how all of us can lead education and technology change in our schools, Local Authorities and organisations have been put online for all to view. There’s also a Google Video without the slides.
Every time I do a talk or seminar it’s different; in the age of podcasts, vodcasts and conference blogging it’s only a fool or a lazy researcher who says the same thing day in, day out. The main lines of this talk have been popular but two points were raised afterwards which are worth tackling. They are both related, one about the substance of what I showed in the talk and the other on the ‘entertainment only’ value of new technologies. I disagree (of course) with both, because I believe they’re just wrong.
In this version of the talk I have unashamedly concentrated on the final products of learning, giving passing mention to the importance of the changes in process that leads to them. I was, if you like, appealing to the professionalism and attitudes of teachers to think about what the processes might have been, rather than just listing what changes took place.
The second relates as much to the way I present stuff as to the depth of change and transformation these new technologies offer. Yes, they are entertaining, and what’s wrong with that? Yes they increase motivation for being rather fun to use. But they also transform the way we do things because they open collaborative and time-shifting opportunities in learning that have never, until now, been on offer.
I hope these points come through for most people, but any other ideas or feedback you have that hasn’t already been mentioned would be greatly appreciated.
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