Ch. 8: Blogs, Wikis........

I really liked reading this chapter because it was on a technology that I've been curious about for a while and that would be podcasting.  It was interesting to learn about how it started and mostly, how easy it is to do.  I never really realized it was that easy to construct a podcast.  With this, it is even easier to see now that you can easily use it in your classroom.  In earlier posts, I discussed using this as a way to keep parents caught up on what their kids are doing in class but with it's simplicity, I can have students use it to share their ideas with each other and even other children from all over the country.  I feel like you could make this into a great assesment tool or even an ongoing project.  In a middle school classroom, you could assign students to lead a podcast every week for the class or even start a partnership with another school and have "dueling podcasts" on a picked topic.  Along with this, I was interested in the video publishing section of the reading.  When I was in school, we did some of this but it was mainly just making videos and sharing them.  Now, kids are able to make videos with very little effort and can publish it to the whole world.  For some schools, this is a problem as it was discussed in the book.  Even if you do not have students produce their own videos for class, I liked the tools that were given for teachers to use in the classroom to show safe videos (teachertube).  If we could find a way for students to use the video tools they have, that would be great.  As for screencasting, I was a bit lost by it even after watching the video.  I understand the point of putting narration to photos, but it seemed like a slideshow.  Overall though, these are all great tools that can and should be used in classrooms.  For my classroom, I would love to use podcasts for my students and have them use them also.  I want my students to use all the tools at their disposal but use them safely.  With doing this, they still will be learning but they will be using the tools that they will see in their future.