Final Project-Podcasting

For my final project, I decided to work on podcasting with my 9th grade students.

There are four main things I like about podcasting discussions of literature:

1. It takes the focus of discussion off of me and onto the students. They don't stare at me and wait for me to ask a question. They have to come up with the questions and respond to each other.
2. Everyone has to be involved. When the group size is only 3-4, it is very obvious when someone is not contributing. The student who doesn't want to speak in front of the class, or is too nervous to speak in front of the class, or is just simply drowned out by the loud students in the class has a voice in the group.
3. I can listen to the discussions at my leisure, and go back to listen again if I want to.
4. Students can listen to other groups and comment on them, making it more of a classroom interaction rather than "I'm doing this for the teacher."

I started by connecting with Tina Christopherson, our head tech person at Wayzata. She and I figured out the best way to get the kids recording and the process they would go through. We decided that after they had exported as mp3 they would post it to my Moodle site so I could go get it and post it on my blog. She also came down and helped me show the kids how to use Audacity.

I decided to have a series of podcasts:

Practice Podcast-Old time radio show. I found a script of an old radio show online and they had to perform it and record it. This was really just so they could get used to the program and the steps they would have to go through. 5 min.

Podcast #1-Discussion of "The Most Dangerous Game." Everyone read this story individually and as they read they were to write five good, open-ended discussion questions for their group. Before they started recording, they could look through the questions and decide which ones would be best for discussion. 8-12 min.

Podcast #2-Discussion of chosen short story. Each group found a short story from outside the class and then went through the same process as for podcast #1. 8-12 min.

Podcast #3-Discussion of the play "Of Mice and Men." We read the book and watched the movie in class and then went to see the play at the Park Square Theater in St. Paul. Students again had to write discussion questions for their group. 10-15 min.


After they uploaded to my Moodle, I would go get the files and post them to my blog (http://wayspace.wayzata.k12.mn.us/blogs/jnelson/) so the students could go listen to other groups and post comments.

As my "Final Product" for this class, I sat down with two of my 9th grade students as well as the aforementioned Tina Christopherson and created this podcast:



I've really enjoyed listening to each group, and I plan on using this again in the future. Later this year, this same class will do podcasts on novels, which will be pretty lengthy but very interesting I think. Also, with my Sports Lit classes, before winter break they will do podcasts on E-ticket articles discussing themes and relating those themes to what we've seen in class. I'm hoping this will give them a good idea of how to write their final book paper, which is basically the same thing except individually.

Possible problems:
-Be prepared to be helping a lot on the first day they try to do it. How Audacity works, how the computers work, how to edit, etc. There's a lot of questions.
-It took me about a week to get iTunes to accept my podcast submission. It's not a quick process.
-Even though my podcast was accepted, iTunes has not been pulling episodes I've put up off my blog, and I can't figure out why.
-I had to have my upload capacity on my blog increased because the files I got were too big.

Even with these difficulties, once the students do it a time or two, it gets way easier and they have a lot of fun.

Portfolio Review

I think I have learned a lot in this class. I started with maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the "total knowledge" of the class, so that's a pretty good gain. Stuff like blogs and wikis I knew before, and I knew what a podcast was, but I didn't know how to make one or submit one. The comic life stuff was totally new to me, but I had prior knowledge of other programs that helped me intuitively work in Comic Life. I had done a little work in iMovie before, but had never used it for digital poetry or storytelling, and I really like those genres. All of the note-taking stuff with Delicious and Diigo I think is really cool and I didn't know anything about that before.

I think the projects I'm happiest with are the comic about my son and my PowerPoint presentation, with my Nicollet Avenue video close behind. The comic is so short, but tells an important story, and the process of creating those includes so many layers like photo placement, text placement, choosing which events are important enough to include (if there's a length limitation), showing emotion with pictures instead of text, and all kinds of stuff. The PowerPoint I like mainly because I had such a hard time coming up with an idea and I think the final product actually illustrated a pretty good point.

I think if I had my students doing an ongoing type of project or something like that, an online portfolio would be a great option for organizing and presenting the material that they have created. I'm still fuzzy on good options for high school students to create an online portfolio like some of the tools we have at the U, but a blog would be one option or a wiki, but I'm inclined to think that a wiki isn't the best option for that type of thing because you wouldn't want anyone but the student changing things, so then what's the point of a wiki? Maybe just the set up with different pages and links I guess. I'm thinking about using some type of folio with the poetry unit I do with my 9th graders in January, so hopefully it will go well.

As far as using the tools we learned in my class, we're already doing podcasting and online comments (Check out http://wayspace.wayzata.k12.mn.us/blogs/jnelson to see that). I'm also going to incorporate digital poetry into my poetry unit.

The big piece, though, is that next fall I'm going to propose a one-term class to teach called "Digital Writing" where we would use all of the tools learned in this class. It wouldn't go live until the 2011-2012 school year, but that gives us a lot of time to figure out where we could do it (all of the students would need computers obviously), if we have to cut other sections in order to do it, what it would do to the schedule, etc. I'm really excited about the possibility of this class, and I've already started talking to my assistant principal and our tech department to see if this could happen. I think the students would really enjoy it and buy into what is going on in the class.

"I'll Evaluate the Hell Right Outta Ya!" -Dr. Cox on "Scrubs"

For my final, my 9th graders are doing podcasts, so I created a rubric that is based on my paper rubrics. It has no points, just comments, and I just choose the grade. I figured it's hard to evaluate people's thoughts and opinions about literature, so the rubric basically just sticks with 1) Is everyone participating 2) Are they offering good open questions or poor yes/no questions 3) Is the text being used/cited during the discussion? and 4) Does the conversation flow well or does it jump around too much?

I like those criteria, and after it's all done the mp3's are posted to my blog where the students can go and listen to other groups and comment on them. My comments come written on the rubric. I would like to play around with recorded comments because I think you can say a lot, but I haven't totally figured out how to do that or with which projects/papers to do it.

I'm putting my rubric on the ning.

Trying Not to Hurt Your Eyes

Okay, here's the first one: http://www.belladesoto.us/

Wow. Just...wow. If you try to look at it, be warned that it will take forever to load because there is so much going on. How does someone even do that? How is there absolutely no sense of "Maybe I should try to organize this a little better." In fact, I'm almost inclined to believe that someone set this up so they could make every "worst website" list that ever comes out. I mean, you gotta be kidding me.

Here's the next one: http://noeband.gr/

This website is really simple, but cool looking and easy to use. When you click on most of the links, it doesn't take you off the page, the info just appears to the side. I love that. There's very little getting in the way of anything.

So I guess I would tell my students that they need to keep their presentations or any digital work simple because you want the viewer to get it. I have been failing for three days now at coming up with an activity or something for my kids to do and I've got nothing. I feel like I've been doing well so far on the topics in this class, but I'm struggling with this one. I'm not even coming up with a good topic for my own presentation. Ugh. I'll keep thinking.

(thinking)

(thinking)

Okay, it's been multiple hours but I came up with an idea. It's not much, but it makes an important point I think. There was one slide that didn't come through on Slideshare, I don't know why, but here it is:

A Simple Brain Exercise

View more presentations from JRNelson9.

Comics-ing it up

I had a lot of fun making this comic. I downloaded comic life, and was really surprised at 1) How complicated the things you make can be and 2) how easy it is to use. Drag and drop, intuition on how to move things around, etc. I didn't put in too many of the extra things, but I poked around and looked at the tools and stuff, and I was blown away by how much the program can do, and anyone can pick it right up! It was really easy and I think students would pick up on it really quickly and have a lot of fun doing it. Adapting "normal" texts into comic format would be a great way to get kids visualizing and creating, but also get them to pick out important points (you would have to cut a lot of stuff from the text), think about how emotions come through, and challenge them to think in a way they probably haven't before.

One of the things I really liked was realizing that I had to figure out how to get the pictures and text boxes to work together. I would put in a picture, then realize I had no place for text, so putting it off center actually helped, which is counter-intuitive when arranging pictures. The other thing I had to think about, which I already mentioned, is deciding what to put in and what to leave out. That's a hard decision, but I think students would really benefit from that decision-making process.

The comic I created is about my son, Joshua. Really, I chose it because I had a huge library of pictures to work from and I had already done our Honeymoon for Voicethread. Apparently Blogger does not accept PDF files, and I can't get it to convert to any other type of file, so I had to upload it to my softball team's website. Here's the link:

www.si-softball.org/ComicJoshuaSmall.pdf

Podcast-Schmodcast

I really like the idea of podcasting in class because students really get into it and have fun while doing things that are, I think at least, worthwhile.

First my 9th graders did a practice podcast where they had to perform the script for a five-minute radio show I provided. This was a perfect practice run because it's a little more complicated than the other podcasts they'll do, so they got very comfortable with how to work the equipment, and they also had to put in some sound effects, music, and character voices, which they had a lot of fun with. Again, it was just a practice, so I wasn't expecting greatness, but in the future I may use something else as a practice and make this an assignment. They could find a radio show script online and perform it, or write their own. OR BOTH!

The main thing they'll be doing is responding to literature. In small groups they will read short stories and then record their discussion about the story. They'll also do a podcast responding to a play we're going to see at the end of the month. One main thing I like about this is that it gets everyone involved in the discussion. They are only in groups of three, so pretty much everyone has to talk for it to be successful. Nobody can sit in the back corner and skate by.

The other thing I really like about it is time. In the spring we'll do Lit. circles and I was thinking I would have to take four class days and just sit and listen to a group discussion each day. This way, they can record it all at once and I can just listen to them at my leisure.

I am putting the podcasts on iTunes as "Mr. Nelson's English World," though it isn't letting me submit anything on iTunes right now because they're "experiencing technical difficulties." After a quick internet search, I discovered people having this problem every few months for the last four years or so. You'd think they'd be able to fix it, but I digress. I think putting them on iTunes as an "actual" podcast lends a little weight to the project. It's not just me listening, it's anyone. I told my 9th grade boys, "If you sound like a doofus, anyone in the world could hear you sounding like a doofus." They have also told their parents about it, and then reported to me that their parents were excited to be able to hear them online.

This whole process is also my final project for this class, so we'll see how it goes!

My Podcast

This is my podcast about how I can use podcasting in my classroom. I just put the file right in here, but I did go through the process with media mill and iTunes.