Kidcast #45 - Building Interview Skills Through Speed Networking
This podcast was created by Dan Schmit. He creates podcasts about how to integrate podcasts into your classroom. This was one of his activities that he thought would be a great way to not only build some skills, but also learn to use a podcast. He took the idea of speed dating from our pop culture world and added a twist - made it into speed networking for students. What they would do is set up in groups of 10, numbered one through five. Two people would be paired and have the same questions to ask the rest of the people in the group. They would take about eight minutes asking and talking to other members in their group. All while this is going on it would be recording. Then at the end, the two students would come together and analyze the answers they got and upload their recordings onto a computer. Then they would edit them and put hm onto a podcast so they could share their findings with everyone else.
Kidcast #46 - A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
This podcast was by Dan Schmit again. He introduced an activity that would be used to try and encourage students to look more closely at pictures to describe and generate more detailed and thoughtful narratives. What would happen is each group, or student depending on how you divide the class, would get a photograph. They would then look at and explore the photo and ask 20 questions. Then discussing the photo together, they would generate their answers into a narrative that they would then record and put on a podcast. Then if you add the photo to the podcast, you can zoom in and pull up certain details about the photo to show what the student is talking about. This will build good descriptive narrative skills.
Personally, after just listening to this first podcast, I do not like them. I think they may help benefit some students, but it is hard to listen to and take in what he is saying. Perhaps I am just a more hands on learner. I think they idea he ha of speed networking was better than putting it onto a podcast. It is a good way to pull technology into the classroom, but I think there are better ways. The whole photograph podcast would be more interesting however. I think it would actually work. I think using podcasts in the classroom is a good way to build up to something big at the end of a long unit, by putting it all into a podcast. But I wouldn't use them to teach anything in my classroom.
Podcasts could be used to support literacy instructions in some ways. You could use them to teach students a new strategy or lesson in literacy. You could also use them to have students compile their own work at the end of an unit. When students are writing poems they could read them and upload them onto a podcast. You could also use the idea that Dan Schmit had earlier about using photographs to write narratives.
I would use podcasts in my classroom in these five different ways:
- To teach about using detail in stories
- To read a finished story of a student's or the classes onto a recorder and transform it onto a podcast to share with the community
- Have students practice writing instructions to simple tasks and then record them on podcasts to teach other, younger students perhaps
- Use it to teach an informational section on something they are learning
- I could use them to have my students interview each other so we could all share what we found out about others to get to know everyone better
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
Ideas for Language Arts Unit
Idea #1
Since my first grade class is working on writing narratives about horses, I thought this would be a great opportunity to do some research on computers. Students could then also put all their new found information into a book. They could type up different pages, differentiating between different topics about horses. This would not only have them learning about horses, but about how a story is written and how to use the internet for research. Student's could also take this one step further and create a wiki with the help of a teacher so everyone else online could see their work.
Idea #2
An idea for a fifth grade class would be to have them create their own websites. Since in fifth grade students study the American Revolution, they could base their websites around biographies of different important people during that time period. Each student could be assigned a different person and would be responsible for researching and reporting back to the class about that figure in history. Then all biographies could be posted online for all to see and learn from. You could even go a step further, and have it so that each week there is a new famous historical figure "in the spotlight" and is posted on the school website for instance.
Idea # 3
An idea for a second or third grade class could incorporate blogging into the curriculum. The classes would be learning about correct grammar usage and mechanics. Student's could blog a weekly writing assignment (that of which would vary every week and be assigned by the teacher) and have a partner that could respond to the blog stating what they found wrong in their partners writing, or what could be improved ect. This would be like peer advising but using a blog to do it. The weekly writing would improve student's writing skills, and peer revising would improve revision and editing skills as well.
Idea #4
A first grade class might be learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. The teacher could take digital pictures of each stage of a butterfly's life span. She could then print them out and have student's organize them into the right order and write about what is happening in each picture. This could be done with more than just a butterfly, but with life processes or anything really that goes through stages. This assignment could be altered to be used in an older classroom where the students themselves goes out and takes the pictures.
Idea #5
Students in a 7th grade classroom could incorporate video technology into their curriculum through their studies of plays. Normally in 7th grade student's read some of Shakespeare's plays. To involve student's more, you could record student's acting out certain parts of the play. This might encourage them to read into the play more to figure out how they would act. It would also be fun to use as a tool when teaching the next years class. You could tape some of the most important scenes in a play and show them to a new class to prepare them for reading and acting Shakespeare's plays out.
Since my first grade class is working on writing narratives about horses, I thought this would be a great opportunity to do some research on computers. Students could then also put all their new found information into a book. They could type up different pages, differentiating between different topics about horses. This would not only have them learning about horses, but about how a story is written and how to use the internet for research. Student's could also take this one step further and create a wiki with the help of a teacher so everyone else online could see their work.
Idea #2
An idea for a fifth grade class would be to have them create their own websites. Since in fifth grade students study the American Revolution, they could base their websites around biographies of different important people during that time period. Each student could be assigned a different person and would be responsible for researching and reporting back to the class about that figure in history. Then all biographies could be posted online for all to see and learn from. You could even go a step further, and have it so that each week there is a new famous historical figure "in the spotlight" and is posted on the school website for instance.
Idea # 3
An idea for a second or third grade class could incorporate blogging into the curriculum. The classes would be learning about correct grammar usage and mechanics. Student's could blog a weekly writing assignment (that of which would vary every week and be assigned by the teacher) and have a partner that could respond to the blog stating what they found wrong in their partners writing, or what could be improved ect. This would be like peer advising but using a blog to do it. The weekly writing would improve student's writing skills, and peer revising would improve revision and editing skills as well.
Idea #4
A first grade class might be learning about the life cycle of a butterfly. The teacher could take digital pictures of each stage of a butterfly's life span. She could then print them out and have student's organize them into the right order and write about what is happening in each picture. This could be done with more than just a butterfly, but with life processes or anything really that goes through stages. This assignment could be altered to be used in an older classroom where the students themselves goes out and takes the pictures.
Idea #5
Students in a 7th grade classroom could incorporate video technology into their curriculum through their studies of plays. Normally in 7th grade student's read some of Shakespeare's plays. To involve student's more, you could record student's acting out certain parts of the play. This might encourage them to read into the play more to figure out how they would act. It would also be fun to use as a tool when teaching the next years class. You could tape some of the most important scenes in a play and show them to a new class to prepare them for reading and acting Shakespeare's plays out.
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