Midterms and Podcasts!

And the winners of our digital story competition are:

Collin (mangoes)

Morgan (Alaska/fish)

Ryan (NASA tracking)

Chris (Achilles tendon)

Dou Dou (Chinese New Year)

Stefan (Iraq) Stefan is not pictured since he he away at "camp"

Congratulations to all!  I was interested that even though our class is large, we had no problem recalling the topic of any of the digital stories.  I think this provides further evidence of the power of this approach.

Having successfully completed the midterm exam, we have now moved to a different emphasis in the course.  For the first 2.3 of the class, our emphasis was on the 3 course readings and on creating classroom technology activities that focused upon student learning.  We are now moving toward a focus on the course final papers.  In these papers, students will write an article for teachers and/or practitioners on a technology application or technology applications designed to impact student learning.  For this week, we are working on focusing in on topics for the paper.

Last night, our resource reviewers shared interesting new software approaches with us.  Siti reviewed a free Office-like application called Zoho and Angie reviewed a web site authoring system called Geocities for teachers.  Both are powerful resources for educators.

We then moved to pod-casting and began by looking at some examples located by students in the class.  Evrim then introduced the big ideas of podcasting, described how to do it and then we were off and running with students creating short podcasts on life in different countries.  I was impressed with the enthusiasm that students brought to the podcast assignment.  No one said---'This is too hard---we don't have enough time!".  Instead, each pair immediately went to work on structuring and conducting the interviews and then preparing the podcasts for sharing.  the two that were shared in class were both interesting and lively.  I look forward to viewing the remaining podcasts this week.