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.

Global Classrooms: Global Voices Redux

A previous post focused on Global Voices, the new web presence for shedding light on non-traditional media worldwide. Global Voices offers many useful tools for keeping track of what is happening in other countries. In fact, these tools allow you to track countries or categories by subscribing to pages (RSS).

The available tools at Global Voices could have enormous impact on the classroom. If in your classroom you study countries (in a unit or lesson) or topics (e.g. diaspora, ethnicity, or film) you should consider exploring this site. For example, if each student in a classroom is assigned a country (e.g. Romania, Lybia, China) to track throughout a course. This might include reporting on a variety of topics and culminating with an oral report. At Global Voices students could use a RSS reader to track what is being organized on a daily basis. That way students could be aware of current events from the perspective of the new media (e.g. bloggers, etc...). In addition, students could include headlines in their blog or website from their region or on their topic (see the headlines on the right pane of this blog for an example).

What other possibilities could you see for RSS and Global Voices? What classes would this work in?

Global Voices

Global Voices is a non-profit media site that aggregates the "global conversation" at a website. The goal of this project is to bring to the forefront places and people other media often ignore, but "new" media like bloggers pay attention to. The idea is that a reader can go to one website to take the pulse of international affairs as measured on the ground. Global Voices has a drill-down feature for searches by region, country, or topic.

What do you think the possibilities are for this new media? Could students use this in Social Studies? In Language Arts? In Math class?