Category Archives: Blogs and Blogging

One Semester in the Life of a Web Class…

We often ask our student to reflect, in writing, on what they are learning. But how often do we challenge ourselves to do the same as teachers? This semester I set out to chronicle my experiences teaching a web class, week-by-week. I realized that my past experiences with teaching web classes were vague and jumbled in my mind, and I thought it worthwhile, for myself, to keep an ordered record of my experiences this semester. By writing it all out, I hoped to work through issues and concepts that might otherwise just fade away without being resolved in my mind. I chose to put my diary online for others to see. It can be found here. It’s not very intellectual, or polished, just a record of experiences, affirmations and frustrations that ebb and flow every week.

Sometimes people ask me what it’s like to teach a web class, and I find myself unsatisfied by my own ‘overview’ responses. For me there are so many ups and downs in the experience of teaching a web class that it is difficult to summarize it simply with a pat answer. Next time someone asks me what teaching a web class is like, I’ll say check out my blog posts! It’s all there: my mistakes, my successes, the good things students do, the bad things they do, everything that is on my mind at any given time during the semester.

When Staleness Creeps In To Your Content

No matter how student-centered you are, no matter how often you tell others you are not a “teacher” but a “coach”, at some point you are going to be putting some content in to your course.  Even coaches will sit down their players and show them how to do things on a regular basis. Your students need to hear from you – and I don’t just mean a weekly due date reminder or an occasional “atta boy” comment.  Students need to hear your take on issues, facts, controversies, current events, trends, etc.

For most of us, a blog has been the extent of how we keep the content flowing while avoiding the creation of online textbook monuments.  Blogs are great for that, but they do have a few short-comings.  For one, they tend to be text heavy – which can grow stale after a while. You can insert images, videos, and audio clips in posts – but that takes a lot more time and effort to accomplish even after you have produced the media.  And even if you own a iPhone, blogging is much easier if you are sitting at a desk. Blogging on the go sounds great, but it is still pretty time-consuming.  If only there were a way to make this all easier…

Enter in to this equation Posterous.  Their tag line says it all: “The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.”  That is the basic idea – but here is low-down. You create an account, based on your email. Then you create an email and send it in. Posterous takes your email and turns it in to a blog post. The subject becomes your title and the body becomes your post. But that is not all. You can add tags with ease.  But you can also attach images, audio files, and videos – and Posterous will crunch it all for you and add it to your post. You can even designate where you want the pictures to go in the post.

But that is not where it stops. Posterous will then push that content out to any site you want it to:  Twitter, Picassa, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious, and even a WordPress blog (there are even a few sites they publish to that I had never heard of).  They only give you about a Gigabyte or so of storage (you can buy more) – but you can always use other sites to hold your larger media – like videos (on YouTube).  Posterous does all of the heavy lifting for all of that.

So how can this help the educator/coach/what-we-are-supposed-to-call-ourselves-now? Well, for one – it makes mobile blogging much easier.  There is even an app that lets you take advantage of the built-in camera on your smart phone to shake things up a bit each week. After a couple of weeks of text blogs – why not record yourself and post a video blog? Or why not go somewhere in the city and film something that connects with your content? A civic event, an art exhibit, building architecture, etc?  Maybe even go talk to a colleague or content expert and record the conversation (with permission, of course), and then upload that audio one week as a blog post. I know these will not be the best produced videos in the world, but the spontaneous nature of them will give the students a sense that they are “following you around” as you practically apply what is being taught in class.

Why not even make it seem more like a tour of your subject? You serve as the lead journalist of the group. Take them on a tour of the city from the perspective of your subject. Mix up the media (text, audio, video, images, etc) each week. Don’t get so formal with everything you say. Start off some of your posts with statements like “You know, I was pondering the engineering concepts in this week’s reading while at Starbucks – and I had this revelation about the relationship between this coffee cup and this week’s subject.”  But really film yourself at Starbucks having the revelation.

The less you script it out for yourself, the more fun you will have and the more students will enjoy it.

Remember what I posted a few weeks ago about Delicious as content? Posterous can push your content to Delicious. So add your class tags every week and your content will be inserted in to your class stream on Delicious seamlessly.

Oh – and don’t forget those web cams on your desktop computer. You don’t necessarily have to have a smart phone to do any of this. I know this might be hard to believe, but good revelations can also hit us while we are sitting at our desks.  So do some media productions there if you like.

(this post was cross-posted at EduGeek Journal)

Group Wisdom–Letting Go Of The Reins

photo-on-2010-02-09-at-15281One of the hardest things about teaching is getting out of the way so the student can take control of the learning process. While this may seem to run counter current to the traditional role of the instructor, I have found it to be a very liberating and rewarding experience both for myself and for my students. This approach has been most effective in French 4335 a course entitled Business French which is required for International Business Majors in French.

The concept is very simple. From the very first day of class, students are randomly assigned into groups which in turn are charged with the task of creating a business. The group must select officers and decide on a product or service. Each group then founds a company giving it a name, designing a logo, developing a philosophy, and designing a blog to present the selected product or service.

Each company is given a stock symbol and their stock increases or decreases based on the averages of their test scores, homework assignments, quizzes, etc. The group members are dependent on each other to ensure their stock continually increases. At the end of the semester, the company with the highest stock value is exempt from the final exam.

In addition to the blog, the students must create a brochure, letterhead, develop a publicity campaign, create a PowerPoint presentation and conduct a 30-minute presentation of their company. This is done in French, in full business attire, and in a boardroom setting. The students are graded on the quality of their work and the effectiveness of their presentations.

This has worked very well for the past three courses and I anticipate it will continue to do well as we grow and change the course. If you would like to see the work from last spring, please visit our site at www.busifren.wordpress.com. Be sure and click on the links under “Les Sociétés.” These are the links to the students’ blogs so you can see their work. Please visit the entire site for each “Scoiété” so you can see how much work was involved and how well the research and presentations were done. The blog will be unlocked until March 31, 2010.

Ideas

iol2Here are some of my ideas I am doing. I teach LIST courses (Literacy studies) in the College of Education and Health Professions. I am a second year professor. Here is  my webpage: http://www3.uta.edu/faculty/peggys/index.html

1. Blogging with both online Master’s students and pre-service teachers in a shared space.

2. Using student authored video and professor authored videos. The professor authored videos are generally mini-lectures, book talks, or brief demonstrations. The students have reported they like them. Please feel free to leave comments on any of my YouTube videos and ideas on ways to better use the YouTube site.

3. Another thought I have about information sharing from the web on our course blog for Literacy Studies: teachers and teacher candidates often look to the web for teaching ideas and activites that are “ready to go”. However, we need to teach them how to carefully and critically evaluate this information. There’s “too much information” on the web.


How can we as educators of teacher candidates best steer students towards web resources that they can use and evaluate  for their current and future lesson plans? E.g., how do we teach them to “navigate” the teacher resources out there so they don’t go straight to the worksheet sites.
The blog might be one tool to compile resources, foster their own searches, and have them use targeted, “pre-filtered” websites like http://readwritethink.org which is a site affiliated with our major literacy professional organizations.

http://www.youtube.com/user/peggysemingson

Welcome to “Soundings”!

magna-vox

“Soundings,” a best practices network for pedagogical technology at UTA, came about as a result of discussions I have had with many of its now-authors—talks which highlighted for me the need for an electronic space where we might reflect on the deeper questions of technology in teaching, learning, and education.

Watching the creative practice of Gina Thames, Chris Conway, Lana Rings, Blake Carpenter, Peggy Semingson, Carolyn Guertin, and so many others on campus has been and is a constant joy for me. What better than to ask them, and all of you as readers, to reflect on their practice? So that is just what I did. And with the expert help of Scott Massey in shaping and making this space functional, you are now about to enter one of the most fascinating digital gatherings I can imagine.

And so, as any good host would, I stand here at the virtual door, greeting all of our invited and occasional authors and readers to this space. Now, on to the digital hors d’oeuvres and main courses….