Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Global Voices Podcast

Todd, Liz and I had a Skype conference call in December to create the first installment of what we are calling "Global Voices". During these monthly conversations, our plan is to talk about a specific topic that we are dealing with in our respective classrooms around technology like, SmartBoards, distance collaboration or technology and assessment. We are turning these conversations into podcasts and publishing them here along with any resources that are referenced during the conversation.
Our December conversation was about student blogging. In this podcast we talk about:
  1. How we got our students started blogging,
  2. How to set reasonable expectations,
  3. What constitutes a good comment and
  4. Establishing a network outside the classroom.
At the end we talked about a couple of resources we have used for student blogging:
Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts by Will Richardson
Ning: teacher technology resource group.
Global Education Collaborative GlobalEducation.ning.com

We are still trying to find opportunities for the three of our classes to collaborate and hope that these conversations may spark some ideas.

Have a listen and we welcome your comments.

2 comments:

Joseph Miller said...

Jeff, Todd, and Liz,

Thanks for sharing your conversation. I enjoyed listening in and hearing about the successes and challenges to working with this technology in your classrooms. I can tell that this form of virtual collaboration could work well for you in solving problems and sharing your physically separated worlds.

I loved the way that the dancing video was used as an opportunity to teach geography. I think that is really cool. I also found the discussion about commenting really robust. I think Doug Abshire shared a rubric for effective commenting earlier on the GL blog. Maybe that would be a place to start in showing students what is expected. Of course, I agree that the best way to show students is to be a good example and comment on other blogs. Thanks for sharing and keep it up.

Dave Tarwater said...

Liz,Todd,Jeff,

This is awesome, what a great way to collaborate and share very practical information for all classroom teachers. You continue to amaze me with your energy and enthusiasm for 21st century teaching and learning. To Jeff, I am glad the recording software we shared worked for this endeavor.