STaRT Tech Learning Community

At the beginning of the school year, I began my field study introducing the Writing Room with the focus to inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences (Writing Room, Abbynet e-mail and Podcasting). However, I soon realized that I was taking on way too much as my time line did not consider that my students were not computer literate, couldn't type, and needed additional support with the rules of writing.

After a slow and unmotivating start, I decided to change my focus to Podcasting since my class has had some experience using Garage Band. Before introducing this exciting new technology to my students, I needed to first learn all about it myself. I started small, by posting weekly unit spelling words as a Podcast on my website. Each week the Podcast quality improved as I learned to add music to the presentations. Next, I chose a small group of students to record a Reader's Theatre play to post on my site for students to listen at home. I was beginning to create a Podcasting hype in our school community as students and parents were beginning to ask questions and inquire all about it, and so I created a link from the school site as well as my site to include the entire community. I even had my principal involved by creating a Podcast of 'Welcome' where he spoke about our school and its exciting programs. Since our school is located in a high ESL community, I had our multicultural teacher translate and record my principal's Podcast in Punjabi and had that same Podcast translated again into Korean by our international teaching contact. Since many of our parents couldn't read our site anyway, this was an excellent opportunity to include everyone and break down any language barriers. To listen to this Podcast, Click Here.

As soon as the Podcast link became active, I began receiving many page hits and realized that I will need to keep up with new Podcast episodes. That was the time to bring my entire class into the project. My students, after writing and publishing fractured fairy tales, recorded their stories as Podcasts. I discovered that using the built in voice recorder in First Class 8.3 had some bandwidth issues as the recordings often skipped. Since we used Garage Band already, it was no trouble for my students to use this familiar program to record their Podcasts. Now that I am teaching poetry, I will have my students record their poems and have music added to enhance the mood of their poems.

During my observations, I have found that students were very excited about using this technology. I found Podcasting particularly useful as it covered all 5 strands of elementary Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Representing). Based on my individual page hits, people tended to visit the links that had audio and video clips as they were the most popular. Each web page on the Internet today must compete for people's attention.....more like people's attention spans. I have noticed that people, and me being guilty of this myself, have a short attention span with web sites as people don't generally have a lot of time to read through pages and pages of text, like we did back in the 1990s. Therefore, I wanted to keep these popular features as well as important information all on one page where people would not get board and leave. For my data collection, I made many detailed observations and summed them up regularly as journal entries on my blog site. Since my class was small anyway, I did not require an on-line survey, but simply checked in with each student to determine their thoughts and feelings on the projects that we were working on.

Overall, this learning community was a powerful experience for me, and ultimately my students. With the complete phase out of OS9 in the district, all schools will have Podcasting capabilities. It is my hope that other teachers will attempt this exciting and innovative addition to their Language Arts programs!

My project is finally completed and I am working on recording the data on a day to day basis in my classroom. As a French teacher, I found it quite frustrating when my students had twenty different pronunciations of the same word, and none of them were close to the actual pronunciation! Considering that pronunciation plays a large part in their oral mark, I knew I had to find a way for them to practice pronunciation on their own time, away from their peers. Working as an "online teacher" for the past three years, I have been given many ideas on how to deliver my course material online and make it interactive for my students. I took these ideas one step further and created audio PowerPoint presentations for my grade nines to download and practice at home.

In the PowerPoint, each slide represents a different part of the word they are learning to pronounce. As the different parts of the word are highlighted, an audio file automatically plays so that the student can hear the sound while they look at it. The word is reviewed again, at the end, and there is time for the student to repeat it. I did an online survey of students to see if this was something they would use (before I took the time to create it) and the answer was an overwhelming, YES!

I then focused on tracking the results of four particular students from my class. These four students did a preliminary oral test in which they read thirteen sentences they had not seen before, but which consisted of the words I used in my PowerPoint. I highlighted the words they mispronounced. I also kept a record of each time these particular students needed to be corrected for pronunciation during regular lessons. As well, I kept track of their classroom oral presentation marks. I will do a final assessment with these students, using the same thirteen sentences, in June before they write their final exam.

Comparing the two pages of sentences, and the words they pronounce incorrectly, will be the proof I need to tell me if audio files really can help in student pronunciation. So far, the data I have collected in class indicates that it does! My students seem a lot more confident in their oral abilities as well. I consider this project, time well spent!

I have been involved in a number of student online writing projects this year. The Writing Room was our first attempt at creating a space online where students and teachers could post their writing for an authentic audience in the secure confines of AbbyNet. 15 teachers have signed on the project so far. Some classes used it for a single assignment, some have used it consistently over the year and are regular contributers. While overseeing this project I have had the opportunity to observe a number of things that I would like to share with the community.

1. Like any instructional strategy, taking students online to write needs to be modeled by the teacher as well as consistently supported if students are going to buy in. In many cases, teachers used the Writing Room to "try" online writing with their students. The trial did not extend past the first stage for various reasons. One of my goals for the next month is to survey teachers who used the Writing Room to find out what barriers they experienced in using the resource. For some teachers, the Writing Room was a good tool to connect home and school around writing. Students could log on at home and revise and edit their work as well as read and respond to their classmates work. These teachers were very focused on using the Writing Room and treated the exercise seriously. Not surprisingly, their students bought in to the strategy and produced, in many cases, very good work.

2. The second observation I made was that there needs to be training provided for teachers around responding effectively to writing. In the online world, responding to writing is a given. There are few articles on the web that do not have the ability for readers to provide feedback. Responding to someone's writing in thoughtful, honorable, coherent manner is a 21st century literacy. The Writing Room could be a great place to practice it. I will need to look for ways to provide training to teachers so that they can facilitate this.

3. Different spaces for different purposes. Soon after we had launched the Writing Room I realized that students could have benefited from a "smaller room" that would facilitate peer editing to work on their drafts rather than having to publish their work to the larger community in order for it to appear online. A classroom version of the Writing Room could have greatly benefited students. While this is very easy to accomplish within AbbyNet (FirstClass) by having the teacher create a conference on their AbbyNet desktop and then placing it on their students' AbbyNet desktops, training would be needed in order for teachers to feel comfortable doing it. I hope to have training available for this in the 07-08 school year.

4. A strategy for monitoring the writing room needs to be developed. On several occasions students chose to misuse the Writing Room by posting pictures of themselves and engaging in inappropriate discourse. In most cases the offenses were noticed early on and action was taken. However, I realize that there needs to be a more formal strategy in place for regular monitoring. To expand this concept further, I believe that the writing room would benefit by having resident writers interact with students, hopefully creating excitement and interest around writing and bringing a sense of community to the forum.

As we do our post surveys I plan on fleshing out these ideas and hopefully implement changes that will make the Writing Room a vibrant space for SD34 students to interact with other writers.

Hello Fellow Community Members. Like many of you have shared, I too have been very encouraged and impressed with the great things occurring in your schools with technology. For my blog update, I do not have a podcast or movie this time but I thought that I would briefly document some podcasting trouble that I have run into and offer a viable solution/alternative to keep podcasting alive in your school. For examples of podcasts that I have been involved with, please visit my class and school site at: http://sd34.homeip.net/shipwell/home/

With using First Class 8.3 Client for recording podcasts, I have encountered a problem with the bandwidth at my school......it is too slow and cannot keep up with the audio recording of my students' voices. The result sounds like a CD skipping, or a bad impression of the 80s character Max Headroom. I quickly realized that there was no way to fix this problem and so I have chosen to have my students use Garage Band to record their podcasts. The podcast option on this program have built in music and vocal tracks ready to go. Students record their voices on already set vocal tracks. Once recorded, students export their file to iTunes, convert it to an mp3 and then drop that file into their Home Page folders on Abbynet. From there they can access their podcast on the Internet. The only downfall, is that I have not figured out how to make the tunes have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and download to their computers. At this stage, downloading is not a big deal as my kids are pretty excited that their voices are live on the Internet. Currently, I am recording Fractured Fairy Tales and hope to get to poetry by the end of the month.