Video Podcasts

I just read “The Vod Couple” from T.H.E. Journal this month and it sparked so many ideas. Basically, these two chemistry teachers, over a couple of years, have gone from teaching a typical lecture/homework type course to having students watch the lecture in video podcast form the night before and then complete labs and activities during class. They use a “Mastery of Learning” model where students complete the activities and take/retake the assessment until they show they have mastered the material.

First of all, from a student’s perspective, I would SO PREFER this style of learning. I hate taking a course where you get to class and the professor just disseminates material or rehashes what you read for class. It assumes that you haven’t done your work, and makes you feel like you are wasting your time.

But how could this model be used at the elementary level? Obviously we can’t have 3rd graders watching a video of your science lesson the night before and showing up to do the worksheet. Not exactly hands-on! But what about as a communication tool with parents? And as a review for students who need it? I could see taping important math and science lessons and having them available on the class web site so when mom or dad is helping with homework, they can watch with their child how it was presented in class. This would help so much in areas - like math - where we teach basic concepts so differently than we did when our students’ parents were in school. I wonder what copyright issues would result in teaching a lesson from a published textbook online?

What about our anchor lessons in shared reading and shared writing? What better way to show parents what connecting/predicting/visualizing look and sound like in your classroom? Imagine having a homework sheet with a link at the bottom that says, “Watch Mrs. Markelz do this online at www….”

Lots of ideas. Lots of potential pitfalls. Hopefully some of them will be solved before I get back in the classroom!

Puzzle Party

I am having a lot of fun with Winston Breen’s Puzzle Party this week. It’s a great idea. Each day, a different blog posts one of the author’s puzzles, and one successful solver gets a free copy of the latest book, The Potato Chip Puzzles. I haven’t won a book yet, but I’m taking solace in the hope that my chances will be better for the final prize - every single one of G.P. Putnam’s Sons Spring 2009 children’s and YA books, plus advance reading copies of numerous Fall 2009 books. Gotta love that!

The format of this contest would be great for using with students when blogging as well. If multiple classrooms in a school have blogs, then you could have individual classrooms post puzzles on different days. Or if you are using student blogs in your classroom, you could create a scavenger hunt of sorts scattered amongst the different blogs. This would be a great way to generate traffic to and excitement around your online presence. Food for thought for later!

Practicing What I Preach…

Last week, I gave a presentation in my “Role of the Reading Specialist” class about 21st century literacies, how they will play a more important role for us as language arts professionals in the future, and how becoming a reader of educational blogs can help those of us who are unfamiliar with the social networking space get better aclimated to this style of communication. I think we, as teachers, can’t even begin to think about how to prepare students for reading in the online environment until we are regular users ourselves. With that in mind, I presented a smorgasboard of blogs that I have found useful and introduced Google Reader as a way of keeping up with them.

Well I couldn’t do all that talking without a little action myself, so I moved the old blog that I had started tinkering with this winter to this new space with the intention of more regularly chronicling my learning about literacy. (Keeping in mind that I am nine months pregnant and soon will have only 1/2 a brain cell to contribute to this endeavor. Perhaps this is “online” nesting?) Hopefully this will be a space I can use to help me remember all of the great ideas I am encountering through my courses and online.

Here is the PowerPoint I used during the presentation which highlights blogs I find useful: Getting Ready for New Literacies