Great idea! Let’s also integrate the mobile phone in class! Cool opportunity to take advantage of all its functionalities and apply them in the educational realm. Just as teachers did with TV a long time ago, right? and the video recorder too, I guess. Although we can’t forget to get to the core of how to use interactive whiteboards… oops, I almost forgot… computers, we have to fit them in somehow. Sheez… let’s sit back and think for a minute here. Do we really need all of this?

Mobile phones and texting implement a very fast paced lifestyle and, although it is true texting has become part of students’ lives, why not consider school a break from that? Why does school have to be the continuation of what seems to be a very shallow form of communication. Why text your classmates when you can actually talk to them? Developing people skills is a fundamental aspect of school, don’t you think? Sure, some might say having a video recorder as inexpensive like that facilitates the creation of videos, but we’re not reinventing the wheel here… we’re actually going back to the introduction of video in class, something that has already been dealt with to some extent - the mobile phone is just a different form factor.

What I think we, as teachers, should be worried about?

Knowledge & Creativity. That’s all there is to it… how to use creativity to build knowledge. Am I oversimplifying??

I couldn’t remember when I had last installed windows vista, the same install I’m writing this post on, so I ran systeminfo.exe to check it out. Apparently I last installed windows vista on the 28th March 2007. If I recall right, the minute it came out I installed it but then I bought a new computer and installed it again…. so… that means 2 years, 3 months and 23 days || 120 weeks and 5 days || 845 days of running it without any kind of problems. The same didn’t happen with my previous windows xp installations. It kind of makes me wonder whether I should install windows 7. What do you think? ;P

From Blog

All this excitement around technology in education is making us blind. Let’s picture a school where there is no kind of technology besides electricity, just a blackboard, books, teachers and students. If you’re not blind you’ll probably be able to imagine a school like that and still get excited about creating valuable learning situations for your students.
Podcasting, blogging, facebook, second life, … everything on the web seems to have potential use for learning. So let me tell you this: a “podcast” is our student’s voice, a “blog” is our student’s notebook, “facebook” is our student’s circle of friends and “second life” is where our students live. So, what we see here is a plain and obvious transference from what is real to virtual. Not only don’t we solve the problems that our students have, we also create new ones. I’m not advocating death to technology in the classroom. I’m just saying we should consider to what extent students’ learning would profit from it.
Technology is making us blind in our excitement to use new tools that are not innovative at all. And all we should be wanting is to build knowledge… how is it that we’ve become so blind?

More @ http://www.tiagotavares.eu/blog/

http://www.tiagotavares.eu/blog/

As an ESL teacher I wonder what kind of impact writing has for students and, above all, what kind of learning they get from our corrections. It seems to me that most of the mistakes in the first composition of the beginning of the term are the same as in the final composition at the end of the school year. Is this a reading / writing / correcting / study problem? All of the latter?

This is part of a longer collaborative text @ http://etherpad.com/aG3NK5UuB9

Back to the conference.

One of the speakers mentions something interesting. Most of the students that listened to the podcasts the teachers created, wrote the transcript. So, if they did that, what’s the point of podcasts in the first place? In the previous conference I asked Palitha Edirisingha if in his experience there had been requests by students to get the transcripts of the podcasts… he said no. Apparently the study in Portugal showed otherwise.

Adelina Moura
11:48 Mobile Phone - 97,2% of portuguese students from age 10 to 15 has a mobile phone.

She’s rushing through the slides… hard to keep up.

My questions:

to Cristina Aguiar: How did you quantify the number of times students listened to a podcast and how do you know how long they listened to the file?

to Adelina Moura: Students use mobile phones all the time. Shouldn’t the class be considered a break from all that?

There was no time for my questions… next time maybe.

http://www.iep.uminho.pt/encontro.podcast/

9:10 - Here waiting for the conference to start… and try to put an end to my hatred towards podcasts (exagerating a little bit).

9:26 - The conference started. The organizer of the conference (Ana Amélia Amorim Carvalho) states that there needs to be more work / studies done in Portugal in the realm of podcasts.

9:32 - Paulo Dias, the director of the Institute of Education and Psychology, makes reference to the innovation that is achieved through conferences like these.

9:40 - Palitha Edirisingha speaking. He started by describing the University of Leicester and its location and invited the audience to come and see him. He’s talking about their Media Zoo. Not sure what that has to do with podcasting yet… Ok, their Media Zoo is a tool they use to categorize different sorts of media, it’s what they do besides podcasting.

Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation - IMPALA: He introduced some of the ways in which podcasts can be used… so there were several IMPALAs, from 1 to 4

The next picture is intesting. A Yin/Yang picture to convey the message of integrating Pedagogy with Technology.

10:00 One of the experiments with podcasting was within University with lecturers, that would record what they were saying and edited afterwards. Apparently this was very useful for students who were revising for their exams.

One of the advantages has to do with the fact that podcasts are reusable and sold. They have value.

Podcasts are also tools of reflection, since one can do a recording and some time later look back and see what needs to be changed, how one has evolved since then.

Feedback on assessments - sometimes lecturers’ handwriting is not understandable so they recorded feedback on mp3 and sent it to the students.

For students he said that there had been experiences concerning the use of podcasts by medicine students. They used podcasts to practice disclosing bad news to patients for example.

10:10 - Podcasts can incorporate humor has well including the same elements as a face to face course. - Beginning (news elements) 2min ; Feedback (7min) ; End (1min) - Joke. Apparently there was one lecturer that asked students for jokes to include in the podcast.

10:20 - E-tivity - He asked if anybody used E-tivities, but nobody seemed to know what that is.

10:30 - Finishing up his talk. Introduced a book called Podcasting for Learning in Universities. http://www.podcastingforlearning.com
http://startinguni.info

From Blog

Can / Should technological innovation in education come from within education itself or can / should education continue to adapt external forms of technology to suit their needs?

Isn’t Moodle an example of technological innovation that came from within education? Check out Martin Dougiamas’ wiki. He has postgraduate degree in education.

The following video was done in the realm of my masters. Had to learn how to use Adobe After Effects, which seems to be a pretty powerful tool. I chose the h.264 codec in 720p. The length of the video is 2.5minutes and takes up 120MB. Pretty good huh ?

With students that are trying to create their first video, it’s really important to make them aware that everything they learn in art subjects, about perspective, colors, etc should be used in other contexts (such as this one). One might even think about creating a video portfolio in their personal websites. Students move so quickly from one point of interest to another that doing a portfolio will make them think and reflect more about their learning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FExkxj-blWw