As I was putting things together for my trip to the TLLP “Sharing the Learning” summit being held in Toronto tomorrow, I came across a CD that Cheryl gave to me last May.  It was a podcast she had made with her class after doing a series of workshops with Jane and me.

Here, at long last, Cheryl’s podcast of her grade 3 class discussing Earth Day.  I really like how she involved so all the members of her class and the tasteful use of sound effects.  Great work Mrs. Woods!

Listen

We have had requests for a copy of the permission letter that we send home to parents at the start of the year explaining what podcasting is. Nathan and I created our own letter to meet this purpose. Our school has the parents sign a media release document and computer use document as well but we wanted something specific to podcasting. I understand that some families and school administrators are leery about posting student work on the Internet. This is something that Nathan and I have had a lot of concerns about too. Initially we never identified students by name either on the class blogs or the podcasts. In the beginning, we used nicknames or numbers but as time has gone on we have relaxed a bit, and now, with permission, we use student first names (sometimes the kids prefer to make up names. Billy Bob is a very popular name with our students).

When addressing concerns about maintaining student privacy and security I would point parents and school administrators to the community newspapers that we have. If you look at local papers you will see that in almost every edition there are pictures published of children involved in sporting events, community events, school events. These pictures often contain captions identifying the children with both first and last names and often the schools that they attend. It’s exciting for the kids and parents to see their pictures in our local paper. It is funny to me how many people are not concerned at all about this sort of coverage but have fears about predators finding kids on the internet. I guess it is all about what we read in the paper?

Anyway…here is what we send home in September to our families. I  post it here as an example.

September, 2008

Dear Parents/Guardians

Our classes maintain class websites (5nt.ca and 56js.ca) and a podcast (portableradio.ca). These sites are used to share information about what is going on in class and provide an opportunity for continued discussion outside of class. Students will use the sites as areas to explain their work and interests to a larger audience. We teach our students lessons of safe internet use through the experiences that we offer on the websites and podcasts. All work is moderated by Mr. Toft or Mrs.Smith before it is posted or uploaded.

Please read the attached permission form and return it to Mr. Toft or Mrs. Smith.

Sincerely,

Jane Smith and Nathan Toft

I consent to allow my child’s school work (text, audio, video, art,…etc) and first name to be used on the class websites and podcasts.

Student name: _____________________________________

Signature of parent/guardian: __________________________

Date: ____________________________________

TeacherTube for Video

Jane and I played around with TeacherTube a couple of years back.  Think of it as YouTube for educators.  We uploaded a couple of videos there, nothing fancy (We used the tempermental, not-so-school-friendly Windows Movie Maker, but that’ll be another post).  I put up a video of a student teacher demonstrating the famous Pepsi/Mentos reaction, a video of some guys traveling the world in a biodeisel firetruck and another video of Leo Brooks working with students on hand drumming.  To my astonishment, my video showing what happens when you mix Mentos and Pepsi has since been viewed over 5000 times. So, I kept digging and checked out Jane’s stats.  Not that we’re competitive or anything…

Jane, always the master educator, made a  couple of videos of students teaching the science of elastic and potential energy (The Comeback Can and the Wind Up Tractor).  Typically, she left me in the dust.  As of this posting, her video, “The Comeback Can” has been viewed over 8981 times.  Not quite viral, but pretty good for a grade 5 science lesson out in the portables.

One of the cons of TeacherTube is the advertising.  I’ve only encountered education related ads, but I still prefer to steer students away from them.  However, embedding these videos in your own blog helps reduce wandering minds.

TeacherTube gives you the necessary code to embed videos into your blog.  Here’s my exploding Pepsi video:

And Jane’s comeback can:

TeacherTube for Audio

It turns out that TeacherTube now hosts MP3 files as well.  For me, this is a big deal.  Jane and I have been on the search for an easy-to-use, free, unlimited storage space solution for our podcasts.  We now have three seasons worth of Portable Radio and one season of Portable PD and are reluctant to take any of it down.  TeacherTube appears to fit all of our needs – even the one about unlimited storage space.  So, fingers crossed, I’ll experiment with uploading our next podcast there.

TeacherTube even gives you the code to embed the audio in your blog.  A nice feature since Edublogs (the provider of this blog) no longer generates a player for audio. Here’s our latest podcast:

I decided in June that since my children were keeping me close to home this year, I would take whatever tech workshops the OCDSB was offering this summer. It was a great decision, I enjoy my weekly trips to Confederation Learning Centre computer lab. Today’s workshop was about Excel. It was called “Advanced Excel” and I don’t mind saying that I was a little nervous about the “advanced” part of the billing. Fortunately, it was all good. I actually figured some stuff out on my own! We imported text, learned about Pivot tables (really cool) and how to tweak some formulas (the IF ones are my favourite). It was a morning well spent.

It was a predominantly secondary teacher crowd. I think there was only one other elementary teacher there. I don’t normally get to hang out with secondary teachers. Our tasks in the workshop were to import student records and have Excel organize the data, sort it and play around with the numbers. The records that we imported included marks like 23/25 for different assignments. We worked on having Excel calculate averages, percent, highest score and lowest score. The secondary teacher beside me was really enjoying all that she could do with the program to organize her marks and classes. I was finding it neat too but I don’t know that I will be using Excel the same way she does.

Over the past few years, I have experienced a lot of change around assessment and reporting. With the reporting that we do, and the comments that we write, anecdotal records now hold more information for me than marks. My mark book that used to have things like 23/25 or 72% has been replaced with copies of rubrics with levels 1,2,3,4 and scrawled comments. I wrestle with how to marry my achievement chart based comments with a final A, B, C or D. I try use Excel to keep this data in some order. While the workshop today was looking at coming up with an overall average to create a final percentage mark, I think that I will be looking at finding the “most recent, highest scores”. I am looking at how to organize my data to sort different level readers into guided reading groups. I am thinking of doing “IF” formulas that colour code my level 4s as red, 3s as blue, 2s as green and 1s yellow in order to differentiate my program. I wonder if I can do that.  =IF(J3i=4=red) … this is going to take some thinking. I didn’t ask at today’s workshop, didn’t want to sound too elementary, pretty colours and all.

I really enjoyed today’s workshop and learned a lot about Excel that I will put to use in ways that make sense to me. But, I wish that I had spent some time speaking with the secondary teachers to find out the mysteries of their jobs and assessment methods. I have always known that elementary and secondary schools are not the same. I began to wonder about how different we are. It made me think about how we don’t really have a dialogue between elementary and secondary teachers. I hope that someone out there sees the “big picture”. I really hope that we are doing things at the elementary level that support our students as they go on. Perhaps we at elementary could learn a few things from our secondary colleagues and vice versa … Oh, oh sounds a bit like crazy talk, too much time spent with IF,OR,NOT,TRUE,FALSE, and AND.

Sonia Manchen and Tracy Nicholson from Jack Donahue P.S. have created the “Ultimate Podcast Organizer”. They took the items that they received as part of our podcast kit and found a container, I think at Canadian Tire, to house everything. With the labels on the items and in the box it makes it really easy for kids to take the kit and be responsible for returning everything to the proper place. The storage box is 38 cm x38 cm. The brand of the box is Plano model 3870 from the Plano molding company . A neat and inexpensive way to keep your podcast stuff organized.

Here’s our latest Green Team Here’s our latest Green Team announcement promoting Earth Hour at WEJ! It’s been airing all week over the morning announcements and is posted on our school blog site (www.wej1.blogspot.com)

Listen

Shaw

Sonia Manchen, one of our diligent TLLP workshop participants, has shared this worksheet to use with that best seller “Our Class Podcast”.

Huh?

Just like pressing the buttons on your car radio for your favourite radio stations, you can set the internet to go to your website/blog/wiki/podcast by typing an easy to remember name like portablepd.ca.

Before Domain Forwarding

A few years ago Jane and I maintained class websites.  The URL would look something like this:

http://alornecassidyes.ocdsb.ca/toft/index/index.htm

This was a bit much to ask students and parents to memorize it.  We would send students to our school site first and have them navigate to the links to our sites that were listed there at the time.

Thanks Brent Coley!

I had never seriously thought about getting my own domain name.  I assumed it would be way too expensive and complicated.  Thanks to Brent Coley, a Grade 5 teacher in California, I came across the term domain forwarding.  Here’s how he explained how he got mrcoley.com.

Domain Forwarding is simply a pointer to your website, blog, wiki or whatever.  For example, the “real” URL for this blog is www.portablepd.edublogs.org.  With domain forwarding it can also be found at www.portablepd.ca.

How to get a domain name

1.  Find a registrar. I recommend you go with one that is certified by the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA.CA). Here’s their list of certified registrars.

This is where we found 10dollar.ca. They charge about $13 a year for each of the various domain names  we use (5nt.ca, 56js.ca, alornecassidy.ca, portableradio.ca, portablepd.ca).

2.  Type in the “real” URL in the admin portion of the site.  10dollar.ca has a “Easy Domain Forwarding” link where you can do this.

3.  Wait a day or two for everything to work properly.

4.  Spread the word about your new domain name.

What if you don’t need the domain name anymore?

Because class assignments change from year to year it makes sense to start up the domain name sometime during summer holidays.  For example, Jane had 5js.ca for a year.  Then, when her assignment changed, she chose not to renew 5js.ca but bought her new 56js.ca name.

Of course you might decide to buy reallycoolteachers.ca (it’s available, I checked.  Act fast though, Jane and I might decide to buy it) and not worry about changing the domain year every year.

Is it worth it?

As far as Jane and I are concerned; absolutely.  The kids get in the habit of going to our class sites (5nt.ca and 56js.ca) for everything.  Very easy.  Very convenient.

OK, but is it necessary?

No. And it costs a bit of money. Honestly, it isn’t that hard to memorize a URL like grade5nt.edublogs.org. And, you could email students and parents the URL and ask them to bookmark it.

Nevertheless, don’t underestimate the coolness factor. Having the 5nt.ca domain name makes our class look like a multimillion dollar company.  Well not quite, but it’s still cool.  At least I think it is…

I’ve heard of some teachers who have their students type in a keyword in a Google search and get to their destination almost as quickly.  I, being the somewhat controlling type, would rather students not be distracted by other sites that come up in a Google search – especially when the words are misspelt.

Hello Nathan!

I’m a Grade 7/8 Teacher from Thamesville, Ontario. I’ve recently started a class blog (http://www.jpepper.edublogs.org) (January 2009) and have stumbled across yours. You have an excellent blog and have some very creative students. After March Break, my class will be starting to work on podcasting. I’ve noticed your class has some podcasts as well.

I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind answering:

1) Is portableradio.ca a place where I could eventually upload my students’ podcasts or is it your site?

2) I noticed on your blog [5nt.ca] that beside each student’s name in brackets is the number of posts they have. How do I get this application to work on my blog?

Thanks for your time.

Jason

************
Jason Pepper
Good Shepherd Catholic School
Thamesville, ON

Hi Jason,

I’ll do my best to answer your questions:

1) Is portableradio.ca a place where I could eventually upload my students’ podcasts or is it your site?

Portableradio.ca is the blog that my class (5nt.ca) and Jane Smith’s class of grade 5/6 students (56js.ca) share as our podcast site. The site is designed to showcase the podcasts made by the two classes.

The portableradio.ca site runs off of Edublogs.org.  I see that you are using Edublogs for your blog as well.  You can upload your sound to your blog but the free version limits you to 20MB which very roughly translates into about 25 minutes of mp3 audio.  I put together a video tutorial on how you do that.

If you get hooked on this stuff, you will want to find more storage space.  One options is to become an Edublogs supporter and receive 5GB of storage ($). Or, your school might have its own website for uploading audio.  Once you’ve done uploaded the audio, figure out its URL and link to it from your Edublogs blog.

2) I noticed on your blog [5nt.ca] that beside each student’s name in brackets is the number of posts they have. How do I get this application to work on my blog?

Here’s what Jason is referring to:

I see that your students each have their own blog and you have them listed under “Blogroll’ which, in effect, is a list of links to separate websites.  I don’t know of a way to make the number of posts they write on their individual blogs show up on yours.

In my case, I’ve elected for my students not to have their own blogs. My students contribute to the one blog. That way, I can moderate all posts and comments. I’ve set each student as “Contributor” and list their names as categories. Whenever they write a post, they check off their name a pull-down menu of categories.  Click here for more information about how we set this up. I have a suspicion that some of the things we talk about in this document may now require you becoming an Edublogs supporter ($)

Here’s how I made the number of posts written by each student appear. In your Edublogs dashboard go to “Design” and select “Widgets”.  If you haven’t already, drag over the “Categories” widget into your sidebar.  Click on “edit” and check “Show Post Counts”. Remember this only works with the “Category” widget and not “Blogroll”.

I hope that was useful.  Let us know when your podcast is “live” on the internet.  We’d love to add a link to it here on our PortablePD.ca site.

or click here