Recently I found an article published by Kim Cofino, a 21st Century Literacy Specialist and her Blog Always Learning. The post, titled Podcasting Power outlines how three of her students have been collaborating with 4 other schools around the world as part of a Reader’s and Writer’s project.

Here are some excerpts from her article:

Considering none of us here at ISB have ever done a regular podcast with students, we knew it might take a while to get it off the ground, but we wanted to make sure it was meaningful, appropriate, and authentic use of the technology to enhance our curricular goals.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve finally gotten the podcasting part of the project off the ground. It was surprisingly easy!

Here is the result of a collaboration by 3 students in her class: Listen to the Podcast on Gcast here or Subscribe using iTunes here.

A pattern I’ve seen forming when I hear from teachers trialling the use of multi-media in the classroom is an attitude of “I gave it a go. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen but I’m very happy with the outcome”.

” The collaborative environment allows students to not only learn from one another, but also to have “grand conversations,” rich discussions about literature that extend beyond the confines of the classroom…”

Rather than me telling you all about it – head on over and check out how Baltimore County are moving into the 21st century to “help students collaboratively build knowledge for an authentic audience using real world scenarios.” Check it out here!

You’ll’ find more classroom case studies here.

Here’s a post I read this morning from the coal face where the following was proposed…

Did you ever have a kid tag something inappropriate?

You may or not find the answer shocking but for me it cements the fact that we need to EDUCATE our youth about how USE these tools.

Read the full article here

I asked her if she could point me toward any exciting projects she knows of where teachers are using technology in education. She suggested I checkout the Flat Classroom Project.

The Project uses Web 2.0 tools to make communication and interaction between students and teachers from all participating classrooms easier. The topics studied and discussed are real-world scenarios based on ‘The World is Flat‘ by Thomas Friedman.

One of the main goals of the project is to ‘flatten’ or lower the classroom walls so that instead of each class working isolated and alone, 2 or more classes are joined virtually to become one large classroom. This will be done through the Internet using Web 2.0 tools such as Wikispaces and Ning.

Now this is what I call moving beyond the PowerPoint presentation! Fully USING free technologies readily available to collaborate.

Australia has a participating school in the project; Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne.

The project won 1st Place in the Best Wiki 2006 category of the 2006 Edublog Awards.

You can download a copy of the Project outline here.

Is your school involved in anything like this? We’d love to hear about it.

What do you get when you mash up Garageband, a group of excited students and some creative time? Well you’ll just have to keep reading to find out. Without a shadow of a doubt, the coolest thing that I have ever seen any students do with a Mac, the built in camera and Garageband.

These guys made the music themselves from scratch and then created film clips to accompany their new tracks. Man, this kid has got the moves! Look out The Presets!

Read all about it over the jump. Trust me, its worth it.I saw this in Naked Eye magazine, a Canadian pop culture and music magazine.

Lets get straight into it;

School, where the Modern Music Makers lay down their own beats. Christopher Paré learns why kids are the future of music, and how some people don’t like it one bit.

At the end of Hearts of Darkness, the 1991 behind-the-scenes documentary companion to Apocalypse Now, director Francis Ford Coppola stares into his wife’s Super-8 camera and predicts that one day, “Some fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart.” Talented as he was, in 18th-century Vienna Mozart only had certain means of making music at his disposal. But what if he had today—what would Wolfgang have done with a sampler? Or a drum machine? Or software for recording and mixing multi-track compositions? Then there’s the accessibility factor: what if these tools had been cheap, plentiful and available to everyone? “Anybody—anybody—who has a computer and can use Garage Band… can take any recorded sound and turn it into music,” says Columbia University professor Dave Soldier, who piloted a music project for kids at the Amber Charter School in New York City’s East Harlem. “The odd thing about that is how it doesn’t even seem weird anymore.

But six years ago you couldn’t do that. It’s changing so fast that we don’t even realize it.”
In Richard Linklater’s School of Rock—and the subsequent unrelated documentary Rock School—kids discover their inner Sid Vicious or Freddie Mercury. But why stop there? As David Shaw and Bianca Brandt-Rousseau discovered, kids can do more than just play music—they can produce it. Eat your heart off a plastic lunch tray, Amadeus.

Shaw, a graphic designer and DJ [and occasional Naked Eye staff member – Ed.] hailing from Thunder Bay, had just left his day job when the idea for Modern Music Makers presented itself. “It was something in the back of my mind when I quit,” he tells me. “I was doing the same thing day after day, and not feeling as if I was using my creative energy for anything good.”

Around the same time, a friend at Bancroft Elementary School in Montreal, Quebec, had started an after-school program for kids and was looking for ideas. Shaw remembered Dave Soldier and his school project, called Da Hiphop Raskalz. “I look at this guy, who’s volunteering and doing what I think looks like the most wonderful thing you could possibly do. Here’s how people are spending their time—where are my hours going? It’s ridiculous.”

 And so Modern Music Makers was born. With Brandt-Rousseau, Shaw modeled his version closely on Soldier’s Raskalz: students (five to ten years old) are divided into groups of four (give or take), and given the means to make their own songs from scratch. Explains Shaw: “Each group got a drum kit with a certain number of sounds on it—bass, melodies and some effects—and they each had a different palate of sounds to work with.” The means and materials at their disposal were limited at best, but that’s the beauty of the program: anyone can conceivably scrape together the minimum kit to pull it off. For Modern Music Makers, this consisted of a malfunctioning point and-shoot DV cam, some primitive green screen effects, a small laptop, a microphone, a soundcard, a midi keyboard, and an instrument from each kid’s bedroom. The real constraint, says Shaw, was time. “We had one hour a week to work with four groups of kids. The maximum [time] each one would get with the technology was 15 minutes. That’s not a lot of time to generate ideas. Luckily, the programs we used are good for doing stuff on the fly.”

Dave Soldier’s formula is no secret. On his website, davesoldier.com, he describes his methodology, offers tips on making the best use of time, and lists what equipment he uses in the process. Says Shaw, “We looked at it as a good template to begin with, and went along with what technology we had available and were comfortable with.”

For his contribution, Shaw—a self-taught video editor—saw an opportunity to connect the dots, and introduced a multimedia component to Soldier’s original idea: music videos. “Being able to put that technology in the kids’ hands and have them work with it and realize they could create a video, create a song—you could see that disconnect being broken down.” Each band—The Disco Dragons, Pop Princesses and M.E.E. Rock Stars— set to work in search of a sound. Shaw and Brandt-Rousseau recorded tons of tracks, and then in post-production peeled back the layers that didn’t work. “What we’re really proud of is that the songs themselves are constructed out of all different elements,” says Shaw, beaming. “It’s all things that the kids chose, and it’s pretty amazing to understand that pretty much everything you’re hearing is 100 percent from the kids’ brains.”

A found this among my RSS feeds this morning. It was posted by Roberta Furger and Marian Shaffner on Edutopia, the George Lucas Educational Foundation. 3 teachers from The Marin School of Arts and Technology are trialing a new style of teaching. The project involves many subject areas from public speaking, media & technology, design, script writing and a whole lot more. What stood out for me was the learning curve experienced by not only the students, but particularly the teachers.

Read the entire story here

Google recently held a competition for higher education titled ‘Model your Campus’. The winner’s can be found here and boy are they impressive results. You’ll need to download Google Earth to view the Winning Models.

Integrate your model with the Earth

Creating the 3-D model is just the beginning. You’re then able to deposit that building into Google Earth! A popular classroom project has been to re-create landmark buildings in the area then ‘drop’ them into the appropriate location. Here are some Brisbane building re-creations. Users are creating walk through models of actual buildings. We have map view, street view, satellite view.

How about this for a K-12 example?!

… There are any number of lessons – from learning about area and volume to studying building and community design …

… SketchUp is one of those products that will easily get kids learning – and thinking they’re just having fun, as your classes apply SketchUp to geography, social studies, history and industrial technology…

“… We’ve got a lot of different software packages in our applied technology lab, but SketchUp is by far superior to anything else in terms of ease of use.”
- Dan Zahner, Teacher, Boulder High School, Boulder, CO.

The above excerpts were taken from Google Sketchup for Educators.

Here’s an example I found on YouTube where a student displays a 3-D tour of his school. Head over to YouTube and do a search for Sketchup for some more amazing examples.

Further reading:

• Download Sketchup
• An Australian case study: ‘Solar Passive Cabin Project’.
• Classroom activity examples
• Go Green Project
• Some personal experiences shared by teachers using Sketchup in the classroom.

How do you think YOU could use this remarkable freebie?

Mr Barlow’s VCE Biology Podcast

Douchy’s Biology Podcast

Simon Borgort’s Maths Podcast

David Fagg’s iHistory Podcast 

Ringwood Primary School

Podkids

Living History Podcasts

Please add links to other Australian podcasts you know about, by providing the web address in your comments on this post.