Podcasting Sample
Podcasting Sample
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<a href=”http://web006.com/podcasts/Diseases.mp3″>My podcast</a>
SITE Conference – Day 3 – 28th March 2007
Day 3 started with a Keynote Address by Curtis Bonk on ‘High Quality Learning: It’s about Nature (technology) and Nurture (Pedagogy) by Curtis Bonk.
As I was the first to be at the conference room, I managed to have a private chat with Curtis. He appeared to be a nice friendly guy. He told me that he had addressed at a number of conferences in Australia, including Wollongong University.
His keynote on Web 2.0 was very entertaining and informative. He was indeed a fantastic speaker and his keynote speech was, in my opinion, the best of all the keynote addresses give at the conference. During the address, he changed his costume a number of times to transform himself into characters in movies such as the Dart Vader in Star Wars and Matrix, to add flavor to his presentation.
His website is at: http://mypage.iu.edu/~cjbonk/ and many of his presentation are available here for your download and perusal. As such, I will not be commenting much of his address except to mention the following points/tools that he referred to in his talk.
· Curriki site.
· Facebook, MySpace
· Learner-Centered Learning Principles.
· Students find articles they find interesting.
· Just-in-time-teaching.
· Create free ebooks.
· Pedagogical uses of these technologies.
· Kairos.
· Wikibooks.
· Google groups, Google notebooks.
· NTIP
As I have access to a CD with some of the work done by Curtis, I will write more about his work later.
Later in the day, I had opportunities to choose some workshops to attend. However, I found some of these workshops were a bit disappointing.
One of the workshop that I attended and which I found useful was on Problem Based Learning, a subject that which I was interested in knowing more about.
The topic was ‘Using PBL–Online in Educational Technology Graduate Programs, Professional Development and International Collaboration’.
The website refered to in their workshop: http://pbl-online.org/ is a very useful website which can be assessed and used by any educators interested in learning and using PBL in their teaching.
In the afternoon, we took sometime out from the conference proceedings to do some sight seeing in the Riverwalk area of San Antonio. It is a popular area among tourists visiting San Antonio. We also visited the famous Alamo Fort here.
SITE Conference – Day Two – 27th March 2007
The first session of the day was a welcome address by the president of SITE, Ian Gibson, Australian Centre fo Educational Studies, Macquarie University and then a Opening Keynote adress by Roger Shank, Socratic Arts, USA entitled ’Rethinking Teaching: How online Learning Can and Should Completely Alter Your View of Education’.
His address was inteded to provoke those attendeding the conference with his radical ideas and he did managed to schieve this. Some of his ideas are:
· Schools do not teach anything that is useful in life
· We teach what the students do not need in their everyday life
· We teach students to memorize nonsense
· Fixing:
o Teaching the right stuff, the right way – the stuff that helps you function in todays world and taking advantage of the available technology
o How does real learning work?
§ You pursue their own goals
§ You fail
§ You try again
§ You develop of a theory of how to improve
o Learning depends upon reminding
§ We fail, We wonder, We get reminded, We wonder, We explain, We create new expectations
o Learning depends upon failure AND failure requires explanation – schools are about rewards
o Knowledge comes from questions – schools do not cater for this.
o Learning starts with true goals.
o Goals for teacher in the future:
§ Teach how to ask? Students do not ask ……because they are not taught….
o The teacher sets the tasks – the students create a plan of attack – in groups – the students deliver and the teacher provides feedback
o Teachers are not the source of information any more.
o VISTA curricula (teaching around a central REAL WORLD project/topic):
§ Scientific Reasoning
§ New Technologies
§ Health Science
o What matters is that they can Write, Speak, Reason, Interact etc
o A good teacher does not
§ Give lectures
§ Give answers to students
§ Give them answers by themselves
§ Give grades
§ Determine the curriculum
§ Have any authority over student’s achievements
§ Necessarily have in depth knowledge of subject matter
The rest of the day was spent attending other sessions, talking to attendees from diferent parts of the world. One of the advantages of attending a conference like this is the opportunity to meet like minded people from the different parts of the world and the links and contacts made.
SITE Conference – March 26th 2007
After a long four hours flight from New Jesrsey, I landed in San Antonio in the evening. From the airport, I took a shuttle-bus to to the Crown Plaza hotel in San Antonio. The ride to the hotel (about 10 km) was quite bumpy, due to the poor condition of the roads. Reminded me oif the drive from Delhi airport in India. The sceneryy on route to the hotel looked very much like that in Malaysia, especially the trees and buildings.
On reaching the hotel, I checked in and had a quick shower and went down to the restaurant to grab a quick dinner. I was surprised that the first person I spoke to at the restaurant was actually a Filipino lady from Sydney. She was a lecturer at the Woolangong University and had come here with her daughter to attend the conference. What a small world! The next day I met a few others from Australia (one of whom is actually the president of SITE, the conference organisers). I also met an Indian guy, a lecturer at Penang University, Penang, Malaysia. I also met another Indian professor from Hydrebad, India who had come with seven of his PhD. students.
It was raining the whole morning. At noon, I decided to make a quick visit to the Riverwalk, the main attraction in San Antonio. I manged to walk up to where the Riverwalk started but then decided to get back to the hotel as the weather did not look very good and I had to attend a workshop at 1.30 pm.
At 1.30 pm, I attended the ‘Powerful Blending: Using Web 2.0 to Interact, Create, and Assess’ workshop, which was conducted by Wesley Fryer, Texas Tech University, USA. Those involved with educational blogging would know him as the owner of the blog ‘Moving at the Speed of Creativity’. He has actually blogged on some of the activities taking place at this conference.
Wesley’s workshop, which was three and half hours long, was both entertaining and informative. He covered on the many aspects of Web 2.0 tools, including blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. He encouraged the use of Google reader and Firefox as feed readers, in preference to Bloglines and Internet Explorer, giving his reasons.
After diiner at the restaurant at the ground floor, I went back to my room. As I was still, quite tired, I retired early to bed. I had to get up early next morning as the first item for the day starts at 8.00 am.
Day Eight & Nine – 23rd – 24th March 2007
We hired a car for the trip to Washington DC. The trip to Washington DC took about four hours. The traffic was slow moving throughout the journey due to congestion. We left Redbank only at about half-past-one instead of the ten o’ clock, we had planned earlier.
We initially ended up going to the wrong hotel in Washington, with a similar name (I had printed out the directions, using maps.google.com , but although I had the correct address, the directions were to the wrong hotel). Finally, after further enquiries, we landed in the correct hotel. The receptionist was a Nepalese guy, named Bharath. He was friendly and we checked in to our rooms. After having having a shower we decided to have dinner and see a few places that night.
We had a buffet Chinese dinner (at $12.50 per person). Buffet dinners (you can eat as much as you want), seems to be quite popular here. After dinner, we followed the maps that the guy at the hotel had printed for us. After getting lost a number of times, we finally managed to reach the area where the Washington Memorial was. Here we parked the car and walked to the Washington memorial, the Second World War memorials and a few other memorials. There were memorials everywhere, one for each of the wars and a number of memorials for the presidents. Fortunately, there were all located quite adjacent to one another and can be reached by foot.
We decided to get back to the hotel and walked back to the car. It took some time and still more walking as we forgot where the car was. We started panicking, but after some more walking, we managed to find the car. We decided to get back to the hotel, which was about 30 minutes away. But it took us nearly two hours to reach the hotel as we kept getting lost and John who was driving the car did not want to stop and ask for directions. And, we had forgotten to get a print out of the way to get back to the hotel. Following the directions in the reverse order did no work.
Finally, we stopped at a gas station and I asked a Sikh taxi driver, who was parked there, who gave us the direction which finally took us to the hotel. An unforgettable night, really.
By now, my stomach had started rumbling. A cheesecake, which I had consumed on the way to Washington has caused food poisoning and I was feeling quite sick. I had travelled all over India, without getting food poisoning and I did not expect to get one in USA and hence I had not prepared myself by bringing along some anti-diarrhoea tablets. I went and bought some Mylanta tablets, which I took before going to bed. I got up in the middle of the night with severe diarrhoea. At 6.00 am I went to the pharmacy again (which was open for 24 hours a day) and bought some Imodium tablet and took a couple of them to stop my diarrhoea.
I stayed in bed till about eleven, before we continued our sight seeing. We saw the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War memorial and a few others, before going to the Natural History museum. By now, we were quite tired (we would have walked at least 10 km that day) and decided to get back to the car and drive home. We reached home at about 9.00 pm and went straight to bed. It was a rushed and tiring trip indeed. We should have stayed in Washington for at least for another day, but we had to come back because I was flying to Texas the next day top attend the SITE coneference in San Antonio.
Day Six & Seven : 21st 22nd March 2007
Again, stayed home most of these two days in Redbank, New Jersey.
Redbank, is a small town, an hours train journey from New York and not too far from the Newark airport, giving access to many other cities in USA. We decided to make this our base and travel to various other places in order to save the expenses of living in expensive hotels, which we could not hasve afforded.
Redbank had a very large population of Latinos or Hispanics ( Spanish speaking South Americans from Mexico etc). In the state schools here, they make up ninety percent of the student population. In a few years, it is expected that the population of Hispanics would overtake the population of the non-Hispanics. On a train journey to New York, all the passengers were Hispanics. Most of them stay in Redbank and work in New York, to save on rental accommodation and other expenses. However, accommodation in Redbank has also gone up in recent times.
The weather over is very pleasant, unlike when we landed here a week ago. All the ice and snow had melted away, leading a place that looks entirely different.
The houses are quite different over here. Almost all houses are double storied, probably to maximize floor space. Most houses are quite small and are white or pale coloured and looks very pretty, in neat rows. However, there are houses that are enormous and probably owned by rich business people.
The income for the town comes mainly from people working in New York, commuting daily from here. There are no industries or farming going on here. But, there are some huge shopping centers, with all the usual American businesses such as Borders (largest I have seen), Barnes and Noble, Macey’s, and Target.
On the whole the prices of goods are quite cheap here. Clothing is considerably cheaper here and so is all types of food items. But I don’t see a lot of shoppers or shopping going on. Probably the recession is affecting the shopping habits of people. The residents here are also complaining about the high rates and taxes that they have to pay. The cost of schooling (most preferring to send their kids to the better private schools) is also high. Some are also planning to migrate to cheaper states such as Maryland, because of the lower cost of living there.
Day Five – 20th March 2007
Nothing much happened today. We decided just to stay home and relax during the morning.
The snow which fell on the day we arrived had just begun to melt. Until today, it was white everywhere you looked at. The roofs of all houses in New Jersey and New York were still covered with snow. You could not see a blade of grass until today.
As it was a bit warmer today, the ice and snow, which had lasted for nearly five days has begun to melt and we could see the blades of grass, tulips and other plants beginning to appear from beneath the snow. Rubbish, which had been hidden began to show up and the streets were, after all, not as clean as we thought it appeared to be.
It was more like Spring weather and we could stop using our thick jackets, although we needed one when we get out of the house.
Afternoon, we went to one of the malls here. There were a few large Malls (shopping complexes) here. I was surprised by the small number of people in the mall. I heard that the malls gets ‘packed up’ during the weekend and it becomes quite hard to move about then.
We went to the Macey’s there and Mahes managed to buy a few dresses that were going for a bargain at five dollars.
Day Four – 19th March 2007
Asset Technology Conference, 2007.
The conference was held at the Long Island Hilton and was geared towards the integration of technology into education.
Will Richardson is known
internationally for his work with
educators and students to
understand and implement
instructional technologies and,
more specifically, the tools of the
Read/Write Web into their
schools, classrooms and commu-
nities. A public school educator
for 22 years, Will’s own Weblog
(http://www.weblogg-ed.com) is a
primary resource for the creation
and implementation of Weblog
technologies on the K-12 level and
is a leading voice for school
reform in the context of the
fundamental changes these new
technologies are bringing to all
aspects of life
The first program was an keynote address by the Will Richardson, an internationaly recognised speaker, who is well known for his work with educators in the implementation of insructional technologies especially, the tools of the Read/Write Web in their classrooms (http://www.weblogg-ed.com).
His presentation, entitled ‘ A Web Of Connections’, entertained the conefernce attendendees and provoked them to think of ways we educators have to change to keep up with the transformations that are taking place around us. He talked of the need for a change in the way we teach, as the students have the ability to reach far beyond the walls of the classroom. The students are not only readers and writers but also become the editors and collaborators as well.
internationally for his work with
educators and students to
understand and implement
instructional technologies and,
more specifically, the tools of the
Read/Write Web into their
schools, classrooms and commu-
nities. A public school educator
for 22 years, Will’s own Weblog
(http://www.weblogg-ed.com) is a
primary resource for the creation
and implementation of Weblog
technologies on the K-12 level and
is a leading voice for school
reform in the context of the
fundamental changes these new
technologies are bringing to all
aspects of life
The main ideas of his talk is available in his wiki located at: http://willrichardson.wikispaces.com. A few of the main points in his talk were:
- challenging times for educators
- changes to the ways we connect
- The read/write web (web 2.0)
- Changes are happening outside education but not much within the education
- Education system has not changed in the past 100 years
- 55% of kids using social networking tools e.g. MSN, MySpace etc.
- Learning is building networks
- Students should be producing work to be published to a real audience, creating connection with other people.
- Are you a life long learner. Who is your teacher? How are you learning? What is your network?
- Students should be taught to be a continuous life-long learners.
A number of different workshops and poster sessions were held at various venues after the keynote speech. Two hands-on workshops were held during sessions 1 nd 2. One was on the use of Moodle and another on Video Podcasting. As I was already familiar with Moodle, I decided to attend the workshop on ‘Video podcasting’.
This session was conducted by Ted Scalzo, a Music teacher in one of the Bayshore schools in Long Island, New York. In the workshop, we used a Apple Mac computer and softwares such iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband to create a video podcast.
As I had attended a similar course before, it was a refresher for me and I learnt a few new tricks along the way. Podcasting (especially video podcasting or vidcasting) using Apple Macs are much easier than using a PC. I should get myself an Apple mac.
Second Day – 17th April 2007
As we were tired, we spent the morning resting and recovereing fron the long arduous journey. It was cold as well as the change in time zone and the lack of sleep was making us sleepy.
We went out of the house and watched everybody clearing their driveway of snow. If they don’t do that ASAP, it will harden up and make their job all the more difficult. The houses were all quite different fron the houses in Australia. Most of them were white or pale coloured, not made of brick as in Australia. They looked very pretty, with white snow all around the houses.
All the trees were barren (as it was just after winter) and the branches were covered with ice and glistened in the sun, which made them very attractive.
Later, we drove to the snow sledge slope, where everyone had a go at snow sledge riding (except me). There were lot of others too, who had come with their sledges for snow sledging.
In the afternoon, we drove a place called Iselin, about half an hours drive away from Redbank (where we were staying). This place was more like ‘little India’. Most of the shops were owned by Indians selling all sort of Indian foods, groceries and other Indian stuffs.
First Day Of Tour – 16th April 2007
We left home at 5.00am to catch the flight to Sydney. We didn’t want to be late and miss the flight. We managed to check in without any problems and went to the Security check area and I looked for the passports to put it their holders when I noticed that Mahes’s passport was missing. We rushed back to the counter where we checked, only to find that she has noticed me dropping the passport and thought that I had picked it up. There was no sign of the passport anywhere and we started to panic. After frantically searching for it and asking the security guards if they had heard anything, we started really panicking. What a start to our tour? I was really panicking, when the guy at the check in area had looked at the automatic bag transporting rollers and managed to find the passport there. What a relief it was.
We landed in Sydney on time but there was a delay in getting to the International Terminal, as we had to wait quite a long time for the bus which transports us to the terminal. On reaching the terminal, it was a rush again to board the flight to take us to Los Angeles. After all that, the plane had to wait another half an hour before it could take off. I am writing this from the plane. It is a thirteen hour journey to LA and I am already tired of sitting and my back is already starting to ache. It is this part of the journey that I was dreading most, wondering how I am going to put up with flying for such a long time. Well, I do not have a choice in this matter.
Because we were gaining a day, going to LA passing the International Date Line, it is going to be daylight all the way and we are going to reach LA and New York on the same date as we left Adelaide i.e 16th March 2007.
It was very foggy at the LA airport. We could not see anything while landing at the LA airport. It was another hectic time at the airport. There was long queue at the immigration and we had to wait for about an hour before we were finger printed and photographed, before proceeding to collect our baggage and rechecking it at another counter, which I thought was a purely useless exercise. Why the baggage can’t be sent directly to New York, I wondered.
We had to wait for takeoff to NY as the weather was getting bad there and we were not sure if we will be going to there at all today. It was announced that many of the domestic flights in US was being cancelled. Fortunately, after about an hour’s wait we boarded the plane and off we went to NY. As I was quite tired by this time, I managed to sleep most of the five hours it took to reach the JFK airport in NY. The weather was bad as forecast and visibility was very poor. As the plane landed, we could see that all the buildings were covered with white snow. We were seeing snow for the first time. What a fantastic sight it was.
Again, we had to wait as the cargo doors of the plane were frozen shut and they could not get our luggage out. After waiting for more than an hour, our luggage finally arrived and we managed to get out. My sister-in-law’s family were waiting there for us (for two hours) and what a relief, seeing them at last. Because of the inclement weather, I had doubted that I will be seeing them today.
Outside the airport was covered in ice and so were all the cars. We had to tread carefully to reach the car park and start our journey to New Jersey. It was slow, long and arduous journey as the roads were covered with snow and ice all the way. My back was starting to hurt badly from sitting down for so many hours. I wonder if I would ever come back to USA again. It was a relief to reach our destination at about 10 pm. It was still the same date as we left, 16th March 2007, as we had gained a day, flying to USA.
The houses were very beautiful, all built in the old English cottage style and they were all covered in white snow. It was a really pretty sight. The roads, cars and everything was milky white, covered with snow and ice. But, it was cold and I preferred to watch the beautiful scenery from the comfort of the warmth inside the house rather than venture out into the cold. It was bitterly cold (minus 3 degrees Celsius) and walking on the ice was not easy as I thought it was. Will probably stay indoors today and recover from the weariness of the travel. Hoping the weather will be good on Monday when I would have to attend the conference in NY.
Study Tour- Podcasting Sample
- SITE Conference – Day 3 – 28th March 2007
- SITE Conference – Day Two – 27th March 2007
- SITE Conference – March 26th 2007
- Day Eight & Nine – 23rd – 24th March 2007
- Day Six & Seven : 21st 22nd March 2007
- Day Five – 20th March 2007
- Day Four – 19th March 2007
- Second Day – 17th April 2007
- First Day Of Tour – 16th April 2007
