Student Livescribe Pen Review

I've written about the Livescribe Pen before here, but I was glad to have the chance to sit down with one of our students who has been actively utilizing the pen to support her learning over the past few months and have a conversation about her take on the device.

A special shout out and thank you goes to Paula for taking the time out to record this podcast. The podcast is about 9 minutes long...enjoy.

Click here to listen to the audio recording of our conversation or try the media player below.

Digital Citizenship Panel Podcast

A special thank you to Patrick Woessner for inviting me to participate in an awesome virtual panel session with the faculty at his school today. The topic of our conversation was, "Digital Citizenship," but it certainaly meandered to include a wide range of related topics. It was fun to contribute on the virtual panel with the likes of Keven Jarrett, Damien Bariexa and Chris Betcha. The recorded audio is posted below and is also available via the Digital Down Low podcast on iTunes.

Webcast: Moving to Google Mail/Google Apps for Education

This was a skype conference call that we streamed out to a ustream channel today on the topic of migrating to Google's enterprise mail system. We had a handful of other schools who have either made the decision or are pondering the decision to move toward Google for school/district mail hosting. We had a bumpy start early on in the conversation, but then things even out and I thought it ended up being a worthwhile experience.

As a side note, this enterprise collaboration/communication network is given out to K12 public/non-profit schools for free. More on Google Apps for Education here.

Thanks to all who contributed and participated!

Further resources and links:
Chat transcript from the ustream chat.

Resources passed along to us from our Google Apps Rep:
Top Ten Reasons to Switch to Google Apps/Mail
Who owns the data, security, and privacy issues...this document addresses these questions quite well. To quickly boil this one down, the school owns the data.
A six week migration strategy
Google Apps Education Edition FAQs
Other education organizations who are using Google Apps Education Edition

are we ready? Castilleja Mini-Conference Keynote Panel Podcast Recording

This is a podcast recording of our opening keynote panel that kicked off today's "are we ready?" mini-conference day from my school here in Palo Alto, CA. The panel features Denise Pope, Ericka Fur, and Rick Reis who are all from Stanford. I thought the panelists did a wonderful job of helping us frame the day's activities by asking some compelling questions of our community.

This recording is about 40 minutes in length.

Student Focus Group Meeting - Podcast #1

Kyle Barriger (HS math teacher) and I will be conducting a few student focus group sessions over the balance of the school year. The idea of these meetings is to gather information from the students that could be useful in making decisions in the future relating to instructional technology. I met with 8 very sharp students today to begin these conversations. We had a list of 10 questions or so, and I think we only got through the first 2-3 in our 25 minutes together! I think you'll appreciate the candor on the part of the students.

Our next focus group meeting will be taking place in January/February. I would appreciate any suggestions for new questions and/or follow up questions to ask of this group at our next gathering. Thanks much!

Student New Yorker Style Profile Podcast Project

Our juniors are in the process of completing a "New Yorker" style profile project in their English III honors class. For this project they were required to spend several hours with someone they didn't know in their community. They did some observations, recorded interviews, and took some notes on their experiences. They then wrote an essay on their experience and boiled that essay down a bit further to create a 3-5 minute audio podcast. Their two english teachers, Holly Thompson and Ann Wagenhals, did a FANTASTIC job of providing the framework and structure for the students to create their work. I have to say that the podcasts are really turning out quite nicely! Way to go, students!

Check out the student podcasts at the Castilleja Community podcast page over here. If you have a moment, please leave the students a comment. I know they would appreciate your feedback!

After the smoke clears, we'll write this lesson plan up and share it in this space.

Interview with Tyrone Brown

Note to edtech folks: This is a recording from our 8th grade trip to Washington DC.

I had the good fortune to interview our tour bus driver from last spring's Washington DC trip, Tyrone Brown. We recorded this conversation while we were at Mt. Vernon. As you'll see from the interview, Ty is an exceptional man. The kids and adults who have the opportunity to be on Ty's bus are quite privileged. I hope you enjoy this conversation.




Direct Link to audio file

Gene Yang Recording: Re-post

This is a recording of a conversation between author of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang, and 92 8th grade students who read iss book. This was recorded in October of 2007 and I wanted to repost it here so that it would appear in the DDL Podcast in iTunes.




Direct Link to audio file

Gary Stager at ILC 2008 - 10 Things you can do with laptops

I've never heard Gary speak in person before, but I truly enjoyed the experience of doing so today at ILC, especially given that my school is in year 0 of our laptop program. Lots of ideas and things to think about...





Direct Link to audio file

Chris Walsh at ILC - "Learning Everywhere, All the Time"

Chris' talk took place at 7:30 am this morning as a part of ILC's "Eye-Opening Keynotes" series. I'm glad I didn't miss it, because it was quite good.






Direct Link to audio file

Tribute to Joe Schwartz

NOTE to EdTech folks: FYI: This is a personal post.

A few days ago the grandfather of our good friend Susie Grabowski passed away at the age of 94. He was 4 days away from his 95th birthday. Anyway, Susie's husband, Cliff, and I had a conversation with him last March. Our goal was to try to get Joe to share a bit of his life with us so we could record it. As you'll see by listening to this recording, Joe was a one of a kind guy who lived a pretty extraordinary life. I feel fortunate to have met him a few times and I feel fortunate that we got the chance to record this talk back in March. Rest in peace, Joe.









Direct Link to audio file

Alan November - Teaching Zach to think

More good stuff from Alan November and yesterday's mini-conference day at USM.




Direct Link to audio file

Alan November - Students as contributors

I didn't attend this session, but I was able to leave a recorder in the room for Alan's talk on the topic of, "Students as contributors."




Direct Link to audio file

Steve Hargadon Session Recording-"Web 2.0 is part of the future of education"

Great, great talk here by Steve at yesterday's mini-conference in-service day at the University School of Milwaukee.




Direct Link to audio file

Chris Lehmann unconference session at Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit

Chris facilitated an un-conference style discussion in the afternoon of last Friday's Digital Citizenship Summit. During this session he skyped in one of his teachers, talked about strategies to introduce administrators to web 2.0 technologies, iChatted with some students, and talked about social networking as a learning platform.

Below is the recorded audio from this session...



Link to audio file

Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit-Panel Presenter Recording

I recorded several Internet Safety experts/panelists as they gave short, 7 minute overviews on their programs and Internet safety/digital citizenship in general. This was a part of the Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit at the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale, CA on Friday, October 3rd. Larry Magid, co-author of Myspace Unraveled, gives the first 7 minute talk and I would say it is a MUST listen for anyone who has children and/or works with children. It is interesting how the message is turning from one of panic and fear to one that is more rationale and grounded. It was a breath of fresh air to hear these panelists reiterate over and over again that the Internet is not the dangerous place that our media makes it out to be.

Finally, I just want to say a huge thank you to the team at Yahoo for putting on this conference. The keynote and break-out sessions were outstanding (the food wasn't bad either!!) Thank you for providing this opportunity to educators for free.





Link to original recording

Chris Lehmann at Yahoo Digital Citizenship Summit

More thoughts on this later, but below you'll find a link to the audio file from Chris Lehmann's keynote talk today.



Link to recording of Chris' talk

Lesson Plan: 5th Grade Student-Teacher Feature Podcast Project

This lesson turned out to be one of our best projects of the year in our 5th grade media literacy class. The overview and project description is posted online here. I teach a 5th grade media literacy/language arts class at USM and I only get to see the students once per cycle, which turns out to be roughly 1x per 8 calendar days (and if we miss a class due to a special event/field trip, sometimes it can be every 16 days!) In late April I had a little brainstorm to do something involving the students conducting interviews with teachers and staff here at USM. I wanted to have the students record their interviews and then do a little audio editing prior to posting the file as a podcast. Part of me thought this would bomb and part of me thought this would turn out as nicely as some of the other media projects the kids have created this year.

To solicit faculty staff participation in this project, I sent out an email back in April and asked interested folks to fill out this google doc online form (I'm a HUGE fan of google docs forms by the way!) The Teacher Feature Podcast projects are being posted online here.

Basically I had the students work in teams of 2-3 to do a little light research by reading the faculty/staff bio page at the school website of the person they were assigned to. While they were doing this, I had them open a google doc, collaborate the google doc with each other, and begin writing their 15-20 questions. This number of questions worked out great, as most interviews turned out to around 5 minutes or so. After students created their interview questions, I reviewed them and then sent the students off to have the conversation. Students used the Olympus WS110 portable recorders that we bought a few months ago. As a side note, I really like these recorders, but they do record in the "WMV" format, which requires a free program for the Mac called, "Switch," to convert the files to mp3 format. I would love to find low cost portable recorders that record natively in mp3 format, but they're hard to find and they seem to be a much more expensive than the WS110.

After students recorded the interviews, I pulled the WMV files off the Olympus recorders and converted them to mp3s using Switch. We then had the the students open Garageband and create a new podcast episode. We dumped the mp3 of their recorded file into their garageband podcast project and then added an intro, an outro, and a little jingle/bumper music file at the beginning and end of the project.

Here are a few take-aways from this project:

1. I think this project was highly authentic. The students absolutely loved participating in the project, and I think this has to do with the high degree of authenticity.

2. The students really pulled some interesting information out of the adults. I learned several new things about people with whom I've worked very closely with for several years (I know many other teachers who listened to the recordings who feel the same way).

3. The kids did a great job of customizing their interview questions to the background of their subject. Having them read their online bio was really helpful. Students could then ask questions like, "What was Yale like back when you attended school there?" It was also helpful having a few suggested questions for them to ask as well. These were posted at the project overview page.

4. I wish the kids had more time to edit the audio down after recording the interviews. We could've done more with cleaning up some the lulls and trimming out some excess audio at the start/finish of the interviews. But the reality of the situation is that I see the students very infrequently.

5. I also wish we had more time to talk about the elements of a good interview. I wish I would've encouraged students to ask more follow up questions where appropriate. But this is something that will come with more experience and comfort I'm sure. I did tell the students not to ask too many questions with yes/no or single word answers. For the most part, students asked follow up questions to these questions.

6. Arranging time for the kids to meet the adults was a bit of a cat herding act. In the end, I just starting sending the kids down to meet their subjects on a spontaneous basis. This seemed to work OK, but I'll still have a few students who will not be able to complete their interviews because of scheduling complications.

7. Giving students skills with conducting simple interviews like this opens the door to some amazing possibilities in the future. If students gain experience and comfort with this format, they'll then be able to record oral histories of family members, war veterans, older folks who have personal accounts of different historical time periods, etc. Our 8th graders are currently conducting interviews on the topic of the cold war and they're doing a great job. Having prior experience recording conversations with adults will be helpful in collecting some powerful oral histories in the future.

8. Older students can do this too! I know these seem "cute" and geared toward younger students, but I believe students in high school and higher ed can do this type of thing to create some extremely powerful content as well. If you have any ideas for projects with older students, please leave a comment.

Brenna Argall-Robotics Assembly Podcast

Below you'll find the audio from a wonderful talk during our middle school assembly today by former USM student, Brenna Argall. Brenna is currently a PHD candidate at Carnegie Mellon in their robotics program. In her talk she gave us a great overview on the world of robotics.

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Direct link to audio file

Happenings here at USM!

I was reading Susan Carter Morgan's blog a few days ago and she created a post called, "The Good News," in which she highlights some of the cool things going on at her school. This has inspired me to write such a post about some of the neat and innovative classroom projects and other initiatives that are in progress right now here at USM. Sometimes I get buried in the day to day responsibilities of my position and I don't take the time to reflect on all the great happenings. So, here goes...a brief description of the neat things going on right now:

1. Just received an email from our excellent 8th grade US History teacher, Chuck Taft, regarding a voicethread response project that he is starting with his students. The sample here is designed to engage students in discussion and reflection on the Kansas Nebraska act.

2. Will Piper, our excellent 5th grade social studies/world geography teacher, has been working with his homeroom class on the "Voices of the World" project. Students have been listening to the other school projects and are beginning to write a collaborative script using google docs for their class introduction. We're not officially part of the VOTW project, but we're going to do our own and follow along with the other partner schools. Will also regularly shares ideas with me about some of the creative and innovative blog activities that he is doing with students (he has students reflect on questions, classroom discussions, and videos in the form of a comment on his blog).

3. Chuck, Steve Villeneuve (our Middle School computer lab manager and tech support specialist), and I are planning what we think will be an excellent professional development experience for our upcoming Middle School faculty meeting. After a short demo of 2-3 simple tools, faculty members will break up in department teams to create a collaborative multimedia project.

4. Our 5th grade students are in the process of wrapping up their "Virtual Tours" of the school project. This has been a wonderful project with the students that I teach in my computer skills class. Students worked in collaborative teams of 2-3 taking photos around campus, writing a script for the virtual tour, and assembling/narrating their tour using garageband. Listening to the students rehearse and narrate the photos that they took around our campus has been great-their oral fluency is outstanding!

5. I just spoke with Gregg Bach, our Assistant Head of School here at USM, about a really unique mini-conference day that we're planning here at USM for October of 2008. It looks like we're going to get Alan November to keynote the day for us. The day is going to center around 21st century teaching and learning and Alan will be a great guy to kick things off for us! We're also planning on bringing in a few other presenters to run individual workshops and of course we'll have some of our teachers run some workshops as well.

6. We started a web2.0 study group here at USM this year and our first meeting was a success! This group will provide us all with the opportunity to exchange ideas and learn together about the world of easy to use web applications that promote collaboration and communication.