The Benefits of Podcasts Within Your Classroom LIS568

As an educator always looking for new and innovative ways to engage my learners with a quality education, using podcasts in the classroom poses as my newest discovery.  Until recent, I have never thought to search for student geared podcasts.  Honestly, it just has never crossed my mind.  To my surprise, there are actually some really well constructed podcasts that are created for the sole purpose of engaging kids in all sorts of educational means.  One podcast in particular that has proven to provide such quality content is Wow In The World from National Public Radio (NPR).  The podcast is “for curious kids and their grown-ups,” as stated on the Wow In The World website.  The podcast provides its user with not only audio episodes, but supplemental material for each episode as well.  This extra material consists of a summary of each episode, and additional questions that allows listeners to extend their understanding on the content covered in the episode.  If you are an educator, I’m sure the gears are turning on how you could implement such technologies in your classroom.  Let me help.

Where Did We Come From is the title of a specific episode created on August 31, 2017 by Wow In The World.  The episode covered content surrounding the history of Homo Sapiens (origins, migrations…etc.) and explanations of hurricanes.  The episode is one of the longer episodes at 30 minutes and 15 seconds, whereas the average length per episode is around 15 to 20 minutes.  Not only are my students provided with a very engaging and well constructed audio recording, but the supplemental material allows students to gain a deeper understanding through their creation of their own ancestor migration map.  Whereas the NPR created podcast only provides its users with a summary in the supplemental materials, some podcasts such as ThisAmericanLife provide its users with a full transcript of each episode.  However, if you embed episodes off of the NPR created podcast and paste the URL into an address bar you are able to access the transcript for each episode.  Thus, students can follow along while listening.

When considering implementing podcasts into your curriculum, it is important to focus on the length of such episodes you are providing your students.  No matter how engaging an episode is and depending on the grade level, from my experiences, students will most likely lose focus after a given amount of time.  I feel that Wow In The World’s episodes are a good length, as the average length per episode fits perfectly into a 40 minute academic period.  I plan to provide my students with a time slot at about 10 minutes into the episode, Where Did We Come From, where they will start, thus providing them with roughly a 20 minute episode.  From there, I plan to have students partake in a discussion thread surrounding the topics covered in the episode.  As a synthesizing task, students will use the supplemental resources available to create an ancestor migration map.  The wonderful aspect about using podcasts in your classroom is the diversity of content available.  Educators must put in the leg work of choosing episodes for specific content areas, depending on what content educators are looking to support.  Learners are able to meet the appropriate and obvious social studies and science (hurricanes) content standards, aspects of English Language Arts (ELA) Standards, and aspects from the standards associated with the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).  Although, the benefits students can gain from simply listening to podcasts and discussing their finding, even if it doesn’t necessarily align in a multidisciplinary approach,  will still provide students with, at a minimum, ELA support.  As Mammina (2017) states, “In light of the Common Core State Standards’ shift toward the use of nonfiction, podcasts provide a unique way to build critical thinking skills while adhering to state standards.” With older grades, students can produce podcasts themselves with the intent to share their creations with younger grades.  By creating podcasts students can start the shift of being content creators rather than simply being content consumers. 

Happy teaching!

Reference

Mammina, A. 2017. Teaching the art of listening: how to use podcasts in the classroom. Education Week Teacher. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2017/09/teaching_the_art_of_listening_how_to_use_podcasts_in_the_classroom.html.

Wait, What Am I Creating With My Pen Pal? LIS568

Being an educator in such a connected world poses many opportunities to connect our classrooms with different cultures around the world.  One great resource that allows for such a connection is ePals.  Free to sign up it seems like a no brainer to join.  It’s not everyday you come across a resource which its sole purpose is to connect your classroom with another classroom anywhere you please in this world.  Whereas there are other pen pal resources, ePals takes a fantastic approach with allowing for more than just communication.  With ePals not only can you have a pen pal exchange, but you can also have your students partake in an “experience” as well.  While ePals offers a safe and secure network for students to interact on, it also provides educators with an organized location to ask questions, share tips and advice, and overall be part of an unique networking experience.

A specific function of ePals that I find most intriguing is its “experience” opportunities.  Students are able to work through inquiries with other students from all over the world.  Honestly, how cool is that?  I remember doing pen pals in elementary school and I can tell you that their was no collaboration in terms of solving an inquiry based project, and it was certainly not via the World Wide Web!  Talk about basically an instant response.  No more waiting for days as the USPS does their job.  There are many pre-made projects through ePals, however if you deem necessary you have the function to create your own projects from scratch.  The pre-constructed projects are very well thought out, organized, and offer a diverse range of subjects.  Students can partake in a language based project such as folktale exchange, in which students explore and compare folktales with partner classes from all parts of the world and actually create their own storytelling traditions.  Students can be part of a science lesson where they explore how scientist study animal traits to create robots, ultimately creating their own robots to achieve a certain goal in their partner class’s environment.  Not only are students gaining cultural understandings, but they are also gaining a significant level of digital competence.

When you think about the level of digital literacy and responsibility that students must gain and obtain in order to achieve success in their globally connected inquiries it is quite impressive.  Personally, teaching my students every year to achieve a sense of digital literacy is paramount, and being a social studies teacher it is critical for me to educate my students with a sense of cultural diversity.  For me, having my students partake in projects through ePals allows me to “kill at least two birds with one stone.”  On top of being able to provide my students with such an unique experience, I am able to network with other teachers from all around the world.  As professor Ronald Burt states, “ Instead of better glasses, your network gives you better eyes.”

Happy teaching!

To Blog or Not To Blog LIS 568

Being part of the 21st century and living in this always evolving technology generation is a pretty awesome thing!  I feel as if I could honestly learn something new everyday of my life off of the internet.  As teachers, having the World Wide Web is such a valuable aspect to education, especially when utilized effectively in the classroom.  Being in a district that provides students with 1:1 iPads, I absolutely take advantage of the benefits digital devices with network connection provide my classroom.  It certainly takes work on my end to stay up to date, and do my best to learn new practices as technology continues to develop and grow.  However, the benefits are well worth it.  

After some research on the possibilities and benefits of blogging, I truly would like to incorporate blogging into my curriculum.  Where there are many ways one could use blogging, both for personal development and classroom practices, having students construct and post short book reviews fits into my curriculum perfectly!  I teach at the elementary/middle school level, thus I encourage reading throughout each year by tracking our overall classroom progress with a tracking chart.  It’s actually a cool tracking chart that I made in undergraduate work many years ago of a mountain and a little hiker dude that treks up the mountain as students complete books.  Students can earn parties when reaching camp 1, 2, and the summit.  Anyways, I have students complete a short book review worksheet that I check and give credit for completion.  By having students simply blog their book reviews, not only would the book review be easier for me to look at, but other students could read the reviews as well.  Thus, helping my classroom become that much more student centered.

Throughout the school year, I always try to incorporate current event work.  I like to add in speaking and presentation skills with the current event work as well.  I provide students with an organization template that allows for them to summarize their articles they read.  Once their research is complete, students present their article and their thoughts to the class.  In future years, instead of just having students present their finding to the class I want to introduce blogging their thoughts and summaries of the current event articles as well.  Students can then present to the class using their blog on the overhead, or students could check out other students’ blogs and comment on their posts…etc.  It should be interesting to see the growth of students’ posts from the beginning of the year to the end.  

Whether you are a classroom teacher, library media specialist, or any other special area educator incorporating blogging into your curriculum can be a great way to work on English language arts skills, technology skills, and collaboration skills.  More importantly, students are learning to become content creators rather than simply consumers. As stated by Broad (2015), “Engaging students in activities that align closely to higher-order thinking skills like creating, evaluating and synthesizing certainly seems more transformative than asking them to search for information on the internet.”  Being content creators rather than passive consumers allows our students to truly engage in a relevant and rigorous task, ultimately allowing them to gain experience in 21st century skills.  Such 21st century skills can be very important for their college and career success.  Some free resources to start such blogging adventures are as follows: Blogger, WordPress, and Weebly.

Get out there and start blogging, or don't, totally up to you, but I definitely am!

References

Broad, S. (2015). Creators, not consumers. Education Technology. Retrieved from http://edtechnology.co.uk/Article/creators-not-consumers.

Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives, and Digital Enjoyers

As technology continues to grow in usage within society, the eduction field is drastically being impacted by the affects of such usage.  As suggested by Prensky (2001) in an article titled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1, instant messaging, cell phones, e-mail, computer games, and the internet in general are examples of such technologies that surround society’s everyday life (p. 2).  The results of this ever so connected world is believed to be changing the type of students, we as educators, are interacting with on a daily basis.  Pensky (2001) introduces the idea that the type of student that is currently present in the classroom is much different than the teacher that is educating them.  He discusses the idea that current students can identify themselves as digital natives, whereas the teachers can identify themselves as digital immigrants (p. 3).  A digital native being an individual born into a society with such technology, as mentioned earlier, present, and a digital immigrant as an individual that was not born into such a society but became fascinated and learned how to use such technologies.

In a video titled Do “Digital Natives” Exist? by PBS Idea Channel, it is suggested that digital natives are those born after 1980.  However, I was born in 1989, nine years later than suggested in the video, and I can not consider myself a digital native.  I feel I would fall more into the digital immigrant category.  Possibly, somewhere in the middle?  Although I did have internet, it was dial-up, which meant I could only use it for certain amounts of time before being yelled at to get off, thus the phone lines in the house could be used again.  Email, on the other hand, was used, but AOL instant messenger was much more popular.  Cell phones were nonexistent until I reached about 8th grade, and I believe at that point it was a pre-paid Firefly!  Although, soon after the flip phone became popular with wireless carrier plans.  Computer games begin in my memory as the floppy disc Oregon Trail in elementary school with slow massive desktops.  I suppose I do meet the majority of criteria to be considered a digital native, however the advancements within such technology certainly happened over a short period of time during the 1990’s.  I feel that the digital native born date should be moved more to around 1995 rather than 1980. 

Although I associate myself more as a digital immigrant rather than a digital native, I don’t ever experience any frustration with new and innovative technologies.  In fact, I enjoy diving head first into new technologies.  However, at times I am definitely a little stubborn when it comes to jumping on band wagons.  For example, it took me until this year, 2017, to join the Twitter and Pinterest crews and I still do not have an Instagram.  I do enjoy photos though, thus I’m not quite sure why I haven't joined Instagram yet.  Hence the stubbornness.  Even though I feel very comfortable with using and figuring out new technologies, I don’t necessarily agree with the way that the majority of society uses such technologies.  We are becoming a society that is connected more so than ever before and only views such technologies as entertainment.  I see it on a daily basis in my classroom.  I consider my 4th grade students, who were born in 2007 and 2008, digital natives.  Thus, to incorporate my generation, being born in the late 1980s and early 1990’s, in the same digital native category as my 4th grade students seems a little irrational.  I feel that we might need to revise the understanding surrounding digital natives and digital immigrants.  Maybe adding a category that lies in-between digital immigrants and digital natives would be something to consider.  Or, adding a group after digital natives that covers individuals born after 1995 called digital enjoyers (Logan, 2017)?

References

Logan, M. (2017). Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives, and Digital Enjoyers. Blogger. Retrieved from http://infinitebrainwork.blogspot.com/.

Marc Prensky, (2001) "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1", On the Horizon, Vol. 9 Issue: 5, pp.1-6, https:// doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816.

PBS Idea Channel. (2013). Do digital natives exist?. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVKBAqjHiE.

A Connected Society's Impact on Education

Teaching in the 21st century has provided many challenges for a significant amount of educators.  However, I personally find it quite fun!  Yes, the mundane paperwork and the silly politics can be somewhat of a drag, but the vast and diverse network of tools and resources that are available to teachers certainly makes up for those annoying aspects of teaching.  For example, at the end of last week I was pretty checked out at the end of the day, like any other elementary educator, and as we were waiting for busses I put on the science YouTube channel Varitasium.  The students were absolutely memorized by hydrodynamic levitation, and they vanished away from my desk allowing me to gain back a slight ounce of sanity.  As much as I really do enjoy all of the little Einsteins in my room, sometimes it is nice to get a break from questions!  My point is that with all of the technology we have available to us it is very easy to really gain students’ engagement in instructional material, especially while using technology.  With that being said, have you taken a step back lately and asked why?  Why are these students so engaged in basically everything surrounding technology?  Now don’t get me wrong, I am surely engaged by the same pieces of technology, but the difference is I would be just as engaged by reading a study or article explaining hydrodynamic levitation.  I recently viewed a couple videos surrounding the understanding of this 21st century technology revolution as we know it.  The videos, both with a similar title and from YouTube, are Social Media Revolution 2011 by Erik Qualman and Networked Student by Wendy Drexler.

Social Media Revolution 2011 was a very fast paced video with tons of facts being thrown at you surrounding, as the title suggests, this high demand of social media use within our current society.  Yes the video is from 2011, but the facts that are stated throughout the video are still absolutely relevant.  One of the first facts the video mentions is how Facebook has more weekly traffic than one of our main, if not the main, search engines Google.  Does this mean that individuals are using Facebook as a search engine in itself to obtain all sorts of information?  I can tell you that it certainly seems that way with all of the shared articles that show up on my newsfeed.  Actually, this fits a characteristic of the Generation Z (born from 1995-2010) part of society.  If you read it on the internet, it must be true.  Wrong!  This is why, as an educator, I focus a lot on providing my students with the information on how to distinguish between what resources are reliable and which ones are not.  Another fact that I found interesting, just for the sole reason that I have noticed it more and more lately, is how one in five couples meet online.  Subsequently, one in five couples blame their divorce on Facebook.  Even though these facts might not have a correlation, it shows us just how “connected” our society is.  Going through the process of choosing or in this case losing a partner, which just for the reminder is a significant life decision, is surrounded by social media!

If the last facts don’t prove to you that we are a little too connected as a society, maybe this next one will.  In his video, Qualman (2011) also shares the fact that social gamers spend around six billion in VIRTUAL goods, whereas individuals that visit the movie theater spend around 2.5 billion on real goods.  That is pretty intriguing to think about, is it not?  Where you might feel that I am totally against the use of social media, I promise you I am not.  I honestly just find the fact that social media is consuming the majority of our society to be an aspect that shouldn’t be ignored, especially when considering the education of our youth.  As Qualman fostered some intriguing thoughts on just how connected we are as a society, Drexler explains the educational theory known as connectivism in her video.  You know connectivism must be a newer word when your word processor doesn’t even recognize it!

Connectivism, as stated in Drexler’s (2008) Networked Student video, “Is the theory that learning occurs as part of a social network of many different connections and ties.”  The idea that a student can go through school building his/her social media profiles and come out an eager professional ready to successfully tackle the workforce.  As I watched this video I had mixed feelings about the practices this theory suggested.  I felt that it has a lot to offer both theoretically and practically, however the idea of what that means for educators is somewhat uncanny.  Drexler focuses the whole video around a student having to comprehend a specific topic and the practices a connectivism approach would take for that student to be successful in that comprehension.  Starting off with reading, reflecting, and construction of their own blogs students are able gain others’ insight, foster an opinion, and then share their insight and opinion as a culminating point.  The researching of the topic allows students to sift through, what seems like a never ending data base, the World Wide Web as to what is reliable information and what is not.  Having students be able to even understand, especially at the elementary and middle school level, the concept that not everything they read on the internet is true is difficult to begin with.  However, once that aspect is understood there are many benefits to students keeping a blog.  

I was most impressed with Drexler’s video when she discusses the social and emotional aspect of blogging.  Initially I thought that having students connected all the time working through a computing device would limit their ability to have good social and emotional intelligence.  However, through social media, such as blogging, students are able to practice their collaboration skills through professional and respectful communicating.  Now, if that collaboration is not guided by an educator, you have a high chance that professional and respectful communicating would not occur, especially after the first disagreement.  Through connectivism the purpose of an educator is just that, to help guide students safely and efficiently through their learning on the vast web.  Specifically, to help their students build a network, take advantage of the learning opportunities, offer guidance when stuck, info reliability, and how to communicate properly and ask respectfully from experts.  

Connectivism actually seems very inquiry based, and focuses a lot on getting students college and career ready.  This approach is very rational in the sense that students will be working in a tech heavy world!  I personally find a lot of value in what connectivism has to offer a classroom, as I do try to have as much inquiry based work that I can.  I also believe that fostering students’ college and career skills is one of the most beneficial aspects that can be taken away from a school year. Although theoretically and practically using social media as the foundation to a students’ education rationally seems like a quality approach to educating our students, we must not forget just how important the role of an educator is academically, socially, and emotionally.  

Now more than ever students need our guidance, expertise, and experience that we as educators have to offer.  However, the traditional ways of educating are somewhat in the past.  As educators we need to do our job and as they say “keep up with the times.”  The pedagogical skills and understandings that were once mainstream are evolving.  Professional development and the correct trainings are important not only for the success of our students but for the success of us (educators) as well.  I believe that providing our students with college and career readiness in all aspects is our main goal.  Our students will be working in an even more technology driven and socially connected world that we currently are.  Thus, it is important that we provide them with the appropriate skills they need to be successful in their journey.  For most of us that means that we need to first take the correct steps in gaining such skills for ourselves.  The nice thing is, we have the knowledge of educating and a vast amount of resources to get us there!

Happy teaching!