Web2.0 | Betchablog

17Apr/086

The Power of Podcasts

I never realised I was such an auditory learner until I became a podcast junkie. Now I listen to oodles of podcasts on all sorts of topics. My drive to work is a little longer at the new school this year and I'm rather pleased about that since I get to listen to more podcasts!

Ever since starting my own podcast, The Virtual Staffroom, over a year ago I've enjoyed the opportunity to chat with other educators about school, learning and whatever else came up. Initially, the motivation for making the podcast was just to figure out how it was done, and I've been lucky to have had so many wonderful teachers offering to join me online for a Skype chat, which then ends up as a podcast.

This week, in somewhat of a role reversal for me, I was invited to be on the interviewee's side of the mic for a change. I had the great pleasure of being a guest on the Ed Tech Crew Podcast this week, where Darrell and Tony had a chat to me about a bunch of things, but mainly interactive whiteboards. They heard I'd been writing a book on the topic and wanted to have a chat about it. These guys asked some really good questions about IWBs, and I enjoyed the opportunity to have a chat about how I see IWB's impacting upon education. You can check the podcast episode out here if you'd like. I've also been a guest on Jeff Utecht's Shanghai -based On Deck podcast a few times, where he and Dave chat about educational technology issues as well, specifically centering it around the South East Asian area. And a few minutes ago I just had a Skype chat with Sharon Peters in Montreal who asked if I'd like to join her and the rest of the Women of Web 2 for a podcast in June. We have quite a podcasting ecosystem going on here...

Podcasting is such an amazing medium. I actually live around the corner from the studios of a community radio station and I often wonder about their audience size, and how much expense and infrastructure must be required to broadcast to this audience. I'm sure the audience is relatively small and the overhead required to broadcast to them quite considerable. And yet, here in the podosphere, anyone can potentially broadcast to a much bigger global audience at virtually no cost. All it takes to be a podcaster is a basic computer, some audio recording software, an internet connection, and you can have essentially the same opportunity to broadcast your ideas to the world as any other fully licensed, commercial broadcasting entity.

Forget about technology side of podcasting for a moment and think about what effect it is having on the economics of commercial broadcasting. Sure, it's not about to put the big name radio stations out of business just yet, but it has the potential to be a truly powerful alternative... this truly is The Long Tail in action, and you really have to wonder how the future of media will look as anyone who wants to have a voice can have one... easily, cheaply and effectively.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged as: broadcasting, Podcasting, radio 6 Comments

5Apr/087

Follow Me, Follow You

What's the "right" number of followers/followees on Twitter? I've previously pondered what might be the ideal number to have in your network, but there is clearly no one right answer. The right number to have is whatever works for you. Some have suggested that Dunbar's Number - around 150 - is about right, but my own Twitter network has been steadily growing to almost double that and it still seems to be worthwhile and working for me so, for now anyway, I'll let it keep growing. Whenever someone follows me I've gradually developed a process to help me decide whether I follow back or not... basically I click the link to go to the new followers page, and look for a couple of key bits of information. Are they educators? Are they actively involved in ed-tech? How many do they follow? How many follow them? How often do they update? Who do they follow? Taking everything into account, if it looks like this person can help add value to my network I'll follow back. (I know that sounds one-sided, but they've already made the decision to follow me so from their point of view I can only assume they see some worth in doing so.)

For quite a while now I've been getting a steady stream of Twitter notifications saying "such-and-such is now following you on Twitter", often several every day. It's nice to think that people want to follow you because they feel you add value to their network, but what's the deal with these people who just collect and follow anybody? Over the last few weeks, I've been noticing that more and more of these follow notifications come from random people who appear to simply follow anyone.

Take a look at the screen grabs above. These three all arrived tonight and when you look at the following/followers ratio it's pretty one-sided. For example, look at the person who is following 14,972, but only being followed by 699... that's a ratio of over 21:1. For every person that follows them, they follow over 21 others. The other person following 1,814 has 52 people following them, that's an even less balanced ratio of 34:1. (with only 8 updates... what's the deal with that!?)

My own follow/follower ratio is currently 287/342, or .83:1, meaning I get followed by more than I follow. Although there is no right or wrong to this, to me it seems fairer when your ratio is relatively close to 1:1 (or at least not ridiculously unbalanced like 34:1!)

Why would anyone want to follow 14,000 people? What possible good could that do? You couldn't possibly be getting any real signal out of all that noise could you? Perhaps if you follow a large number of people you might like to leave a comment about it.

I used to feel obligated to "keep up" with Twitter, but I've decided that I need to think about it like a river flowing past me... I don't need to read every single tweet. When I had 50 or so people in my network I used to be able to do that, but as it's grown I now use Twitter differently, just to give me a sense of the zeitgeist of what's happening out there. I don't bother reading every single post now - I just can't, there's too many - but I do scan through many of them as they pop up in Twitterific or Twhirl. I feel like I only need to find that occasional gem of a url, read an occasional worthwhile insight, contribute occasionally to a conversation going on, or catch the latest snippet of online gossip to make Twitter work for me. With nearly 300 people on my follow list I definitely use Twitter differently now compared to how I used to use it when there were only 50 or so on my follow list, but it's still worthwhile being part of it. I have just found I need to be more relaxed about it, less concerned with "keeping up", and I've learned to be content with what I do get from Twitter rather than worrying about what I might be missing.

I'm sure this is all just part of an evolutionary process of how Twitter works for you depending on how many are in your network, but I still find it hard to imagine what use you'd get from having thousands on your follow list.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:55 — 2.7MB)

Tagged as: betchaboy, twhirl, Twitter, twitterfic 7 Comments

12Mar/084

Becoming a Moodle Dude

Julian Ridden training in Moodle Some things make you proud to be Australian.

As a nation with a relatively small population we have achieved some excellent results on the world stage. Sport. Science. The Arts. Even technology.

One of the real success stories of Australia's technology achievement is Moodle. As an open source eLearning platform, Moodle started its life as a thesis project by a guy named Martin Dougiamas at Western Australia's Curtin University, and has quickly grown into a major player in the rapidly growing eLearning world. Importantly, Moodle has been designed from day one to support learning using a social constructivist philosophy. Dougiamas belief is that people learn best when they are networked and connected, able to share and communicate ideas, and this belief underpins everything about Moodle's design.

I am currently half way through a 4 day Moodle workshop and the more I learn, the more amazed I am at the maturity and depth of Moodle. It's a relatively young piece of software that is growing rapidly thanks to a global community of developers. Although I have dabbled with Moodle a few times in the past, the last two days have really opened my eyes as to the power of what it offers. It is really powerful. And the next two days will focus on the backend administration stuff so I'm sure I'll be equally as blown away.

Thankfully, we've had Julian Ridden as our trainer. Julian is the ICT Integrator at St Ignatius, Riverview and is arguably one of Australia's (and possibly the world's) most knowledgable Moodle guys. His explanations, advice and insights into Moodle have been priceless. I'm especially thankful that he is not just a techie (although he's pretty darn good that that side of things too), but he is also a teacher and everything he's been sharing about the use of Moodle comes from a really sound pedagogical background that can only come from someone who is still in real classrooms every day.

My new school, PLC Sydney, has a fairly large Moodle installation which aims to manage a lot of our course material and although it's well developed and quite extensive, I'm realising now that there is lots of room for improving it. Like many tech developments, especially in a school environment, our Moodle has grown in a fairly organic way and probably suffers from a lack of design. I'm realising that, as with all web design projects, thorough planning needs to account for at least half of the time and effort involved in putting it together. As I return to school next week thinking about a complete overhaul of our Moodle server, I'm seeing that we really need to think it through very thoroughly before we start building anything.

One of the things I was most struck by is the modular, extensible nature of Moodle. I thought it could just do the handful of things that a standard Moodle install comes with - forum, wiki, chat, quizzes, surveys, and so on. These activity tools are very useful of course, but Julian has been showing us the huge library of resources at www.moodle.org... literally hundreds of extra modules that can be dropped in to the back end to add more functionality to the standard Moodle installation. Integration with RSS and Web 2.0 tools, podcasting modules, all sort of interesting blocks, activities and filters... I'm just gobsmacked at how hugely flexible this tool is!

Moodle just released version 1.9 a few days ago, and it has quite a few improvements over 1.8. Most notable of these is the integrated teachers markbook, which has been supercharged to now have all the features a teacher could want in a markbook (including support for outcomes!) but there are quite a few other neat new features worth checking out too.

I've installed Moodle locally on my MacBook Pro using the MAMP engine, so I now have access to the full Moodle installation, inclucing the backend database, to play with. I'm dabbling away, adding stuff, breaking stuff, learning how it works, before I get focussed on rebuilding the PLC Moodle. If you want to dabble with Moodle too, I recommend installing it on your own computer and playing with it.

I'm looking forward to becoming a much more accomplished Moodler!

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tagged as: dougiamas, mamp, Moodle, ridden 4 Comments

10Mar/085

Living in the Cloud

Until fairly recently, most of my computing was done locally using "real apps". By this, I mean they are cllient-side applications installed on the hard drive of my own computer. I guess I've always liked the speed and convenience of having my applications - tools like Office, email, calendar, feedreader, etc - right there on my hard drive where I could get to them running at full local speed. Once you've been spoilt by the responsiveness of locally-run apps, web apps that run from the Internet just aren't as snappy.

Of course, many will say that locally installed apps are old skool; that if you really think with a Web 2.0 mindset, then running your key software directly from the Internet makes more sense. The world is certainly trending that way, with a proliferation of Web 2.0 apps that now run directly from "the cloud" and computing devices designed to work this way, such as the Macbook Air. Computing in the cloud started with obvious applications like webmail, but have now extended to office productivity software, photo editing, even video production, all workable with nothing more than a web browser and a broadband connection.

Life is all about compromises and finding the right balance. Although I've been resisting cloud computing for a while, my circumstances changed recently and I decided to make a switch to see if I could manage moving my basic tools off the desktop and into the big blue nowhere.

The real trigger for making the move to the cloud was an increase in the number of computers I was working on every day. My main machine has been a Macbook Pro, which I essentially did everything on. I also owned a 20" iMac on my desktop, but that was used mainly for editing podcasts and storing my media with iPhoto and iTunes. I really didn't spend that much time on the iMac, although it's a beautiful machine to use. Since we moved house recently though, I've been using the iMac a lot more, even more than the MacBook Pro. Then when I started the new job I was given a Toshiba 12" Tablet PC as my work machine. It became awkward to manage all my stuff since it was now spread across three different computers, all using locally installed software applications. Suddenly, locally installed apps were making a whole lot less sense, with important emails and documents never on the machine I happened to be using, my work calendar and my personal calendar getting out of sync on different machines, and I figured it was time to start looking for a better way to consolidate my digital life.

So here's the problem... I had three machines grabbing email from 5 different accounts, two calendars that needed to be kept separate but I also needed to cross reference them against each other, a writing project which required collaboration with another writer in a remote location, and a group of RSS feeds that were being picked up on three different machines. My digital life was a mess...

It was finally time to submit to the cloud computing model and take all of these disparate bits and move them to cyberspace, where I could access them from any computer. There are many tools to enable this, but I decided to go with Google's tools since they seem to work really well together and one login would give me access to everything... Gmail for my email, Google Reader for my RSS aggregator, Google Calendar for my appointments, and GoogleDocs for my documents. I won't labour the point about these tools since I assume most people are already pretty familiar with them, and using web apps is hardly a revolution, but I did want to mention a few tweaks and tips that really made the move to the cloud so much more workable for me.

First, Gmail. For a long time, I've been a heavy user of Entourage, and more recently Apple's Mail, and really liked them. Although I've had a Gmail account for ages, I mainly used it just as my secondary mail account. My real mail comes in on chris[@]betcher.org and I didn't really want to switch that. Thankfully, Gmail has the ability to hook into my ISP's account and pull my regular mail into the Gmail service. This means that I can now stick to my long term email address via my regular ISP but get to it with the convenience of Gmail's web-based anywhere-access. I added another POP account I had and I can now send and receive mail from any of these addresses via Gmail, from any machine, with the added advantage of a powerful spam filtering service freely supplied by Google.

Second, my feed reader. I tossed up whether to use Google Reader, Pageflakes, NetVibes or Bloglines. The new Bloglines beta looked good, but had a few annoying behaviours. After testing each system for a few days, I decided on Google Reader. Once it's set up, it works very smoothly with Flock - my browser of choice - to add RSS feeds. The way it displays feeds is really intuitive and each to understand, and it was able to import the OPML file from my desktop feedreader, Vienna. So far, I'm impressed with Reader and I can now check my feeds from any machine, and keep them all in sync.

Google Docs are wonderful. Although I've got a Microsoft Office Specialist certificate and am a pretty capable "power user" of MS Word, like most people I mostly use it to type up fairly simple documents. Google Docs may lack many of the features of Microsoft Office, but they are mostly features I don't use anyway, and the ability to collaborate on documents with other people more than makes up for the missing features. Working across several machines, the ability to have all my documents accessible from one place - the Internet - is an incredibly useful concept. But I was really won over with Google Docs when I saw the Firefox plug-in called GDocs Bar. This plug-in gives one-click access to Google Docs for both accessing your online files as well as uploading new ones. GDocs Bar makes Google Docs so much more functional.

Finally, the other big problem was that my personal calendar was being managed by iCal on my MacBook Pro, and my work calendar was being managed by Outlook on the school's Exchange server. This made it hard to look at both my work and personal events together, as both were kept in separate places although they had overlapping events. The killer link in making the move to the cloud came with the ability to sync both the iCal and Outlook calendars into a single Google calendar. To achieve this, I used a $25 app called Spanning Sync to synchronise iCal to my Google calendar. It works fantastically with perfect two way syncing. I then used the free Google Calendar Sync tool to do a two way sync of my work Outlook calendar into my Google calendar. The end result is that my online Google calendar now pulls data from my two separate calendars and displays it in real time, in one place, easily accessible from any browser. This is way cool...

The bottom line is that I now feel I have a really workable cloud computing experience, with all my key information stored in one place - the web - that I can get to from any of my machines. I know there is still plenty of life left in the locally installed software model, especially for the more computationally intensive multimedia applications, but so far I'm pretty impressed at just how easy and effective it has been to move my most commonly used productivity apps to the cloud.

I just hope we can trust Google.

Tags: cloud, google, network, internet, webapp, web2.0

Popularity: 3% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:51 — 4.7MB)

Filed under: My Tools, Productivity, User Interface, web2.0 5 Comments

2Mar/080

On the Power of Networks

I was doing some stuff on Voicethread this morning and spotted a Twitter from Alec Couros directing me to a very powerful use of Voicethread. Alec is a professor at the University of Saskatoon in Regina, Canada, and posed the question "What does your Network mean to you?" as a Voicethread and got a large number of responses from a wide range of educators. It's very interesting to scan through the responses and see what a wide range of ideas can be held within a single Voicethread.

Take a look for yourself...

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Filed under: Podcasting, Teacher PD, web2.0 No Comments

7Feb/082

To Blog, or Not to Blog?

The Education Network Australia, or Edna for short, recently did a little survey of why people blog (or don't blog) as part of their eLearning Insights series. They did it on their Vox Pop service, a rather neat little web app that enables people to record an audio grab directly to a widgety thing on the page, a little like Evoca or Voicethread. This sort of technology is neat because you can embed audio into a page without the need for special software and there is no messing about with uploading files, etc. How very Web 2.0...

Anyway, they were asking people to respond to the question "Do you blog? Why or why not?"

I left a comment on the service, but I was also quite intrigued to hear everyone else's responses to the question. Those who blogged regularly seemed to focus on the idea of community, collaboration, conversation and the whole idea of "wisdom of crowds" thinking. I thought the responses of those who didn't blog were rather interesting though, with reasons ranging across not enough time, finding it all too revealing and personal, and not thinking they had anything to say.

Anyway, it's worth a listen if you get a few minutes. Click the link below to play the audio...

http://media.educationau.edu.au/E-Insights_Episode16f.mp3

Popularity: 1% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (9.0MB)

Filed under: Australia, Blogging, Teacher PD, web2.0 2 Comments

1Feb/082

Building my Wild Self

Having taught high school for basically all of my teaching career, I've just started working with the little kids in a R-12 school. (The R stands for Reception, and is the grade before Kindergarten) It's great working with the littlies, they are so cute!

I team taught with another teacher today for the Grade 2 computer lesson and although they only did some pretty basic word processing stuff today I was impressed with just how capable some of these young students are with technology. I even had one of the students, a delightful young lady all of about seven years old, solve a password problem that had me, the teacher and the IT Director stumped. She remembered the login name and an arcane 6 character password which had not been used since before the Christmas holidays - about seven weeks ago. Pretty clever I thought. (Don't even get me started on why our kinder age kids are required to have a strong, secure password that changes every 90 days... they play Kidpix and games for goodness sake!) However, the students all eventually got logged in and spent the lesson doing some stuff in Word.

I'm keen to get the kids doing some more interesting work with some of the Web 2.0 apps, although I need to work with their classroom teachers to figure out exactly what that might be. Small steps to start with... my new school does not have much of a Web 2.0 mindset yet, but it a pleasure to be working with teachers who are really keen to learn and to try new things. I know we will make good progress.

Eventually, these kids will need to have an online identity though, and usually that means they will need an avatar to represent themselves. As an adult, I usually just use a small photo of myself for an avatar, but I was interested to read a post by Silvia Tolisano over at the Langwitches blog about some of the options she uses for avatar-making with younger students. Obviously there are some really important issues to consider when working with the young students to maintain their privacy and security. First names only. No defining or identifying information. No photos.

In her post, Silvia mentions a rather fun little web app called Building my Wild Self, which enables kids to create a modular avatar out of bits and pieces... head, arms, legs, clothes, eyes, mouth, etc... just pick the parts you like, assemble them together, and it creates a cool looking "mini-me". I'm sure the kids will have a lot of fun using it and I'm looking forward to getting them to try it out.

I'm especially interested in seeing how intuitive these little kids find the site. My first impression of these very young students is that they are very much at home in a digital environment, and I'm keen to extend upon that by introducing both the teachers and the students to some of the more engaging applications from the Web 2.0 world.

Tags: avatar, safety, kindergarten, infants

Popularity: 2% [?]

Filed under: Kids and Learning, Security, web2.0 2 Comments

29Jan/081

Where there's a Will…

If you read blogs about education with any sort of regularity you will no doubt recognise the name Will Richardson. Will's blog, Weblogg-ed, has become somewhat of a keystone in the edublogosphere, not just for the things he writes about and the thinking he does about education in the 21st century, but also because he is just so darn prolific!

Thanks to the jungle drums of Twitter, I was really excited to hear that Will is coming to Australia to deliver a talk entitled The Why 2 of Web 2.0. I don't know Will personally at all, but we have bumped into each other a few times in various chat rooms and UStream sessions. He was one of the founding ideas-people behind the global K-12 Online Conference (although his commitments at the time required him hand it over to others to run). His has been a seminal voice of the blogosphere for a long time, having written several books on blogging and the use of Web 2.0 in the classroom, spoken at conferences all around the world. Will is pretty well respected in the edublogging world.

Given all that, I'd certainly like to meet him and hear what he has to say.

If you are interested in education and the way it applies to 21st Century learning, then try to get along to either Brisbane (May 7) or Sydney (May 9). I've already booked my ticket!

No doubt some of us Sydney bloggers will get together and try to get together with Will while he's here. How about you? Join us?

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged as: conferences, edublogging, sydney, willrichardson 1 Comment

19Jan/086

In Real Life

One of the really cool things about being a globally connected teacher is the opportunities to develop relationships with other like-minded educators. As I've said once or twice before, learning is a conversation and as we start to engage in that conversation it continues to feed our need for ongoing learning. Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and the blogosphere, as well as some still-useful "old skool" technologies like Skype, email and mobile phones means that we can be incredibly connected to each other if we choose to be.

I started hanging around online communities a long time ago; in fact, as a teenager I was a geeky kid with a Citizens Band radio and used to sit in my room late at night having conversations with lots of people from all over Sydney and beyond that I mostly never met. (I say "mostly", because I did actually meet a few of my CB buddies and became quite good long-term friends with some of them) When I got into computers I remember the excitement of logging onto the old fashioned BBSes (bulletin boards systems) and posting disembodied text threads back and forward with other users... the technology was the exciting part and it was easy to overlook the fact that these invisible "users" were real people just like me. Ah, good times.

As online communities started springing up all over the place in the mid 90s, I joined lots of them. Forums, discussion boards, IRC chat and IM... what these tools have always facilitated is conversation, which is critical to feeling connected and engaging with ideas. Occasionally, I have had the opportunity to connect with people from these lists IRL (in real life). I remember the first time I ever met someone IRL from the OzTeachers list... I was going to Canberra on a business trip and since I had engaged in many interesting exchanges with a Canberra based teacher-librarian called Barbara Braxton, I emailed her offlist to suggest that I drop in and have a look around her school. It's a really nice experience to meet someone IRL whom you have only ever known virtually, and Barbara spent a good hour or so giving me a grand tour around her school.

Not long after that I had to go to Perth to run some workshops so I contacted another OzTeacher from Fremantle, Bryn Jones. I met Bryn at his place and then he and I went for a few beers down on the Freo docks and shared a few stories and ideas about education and life in general. Since then, I've met a number of other people from the OzTeachers list, including Adrian Greig, Fiona Banjer, Kerry Smith, Mal Lee, John Pearce and others. While being a member of an online community is a great thing, being able to put a face to the name and get to know someone in real life adds a wonderful extra dimension.

A few days ago I noticed on Twitter that Barbara Dieu from Brasil was visiting Sydney. I tweeted a quick G'day and said that maybe we should get together. Barbara thought it a good idea, so I tried to round up a few other Sydney bloggers to join us. In the end, it just ended up being the infamous Judy O'Connell from the heyjude blog, so the other night Judy, Barbara and I met up for dinner at a little café in Newtown. (The same café where Judy, Westley Fields and others had dinner with Alan Levine on his recent trip to Sydney) It was really neat to meet IRL like this... I'd met Judy briefly at a conference a few months prior, and Barbara and I had exchanged a few emails when we almost presented a session together with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach at the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai last year, but to actually get together for a drink, dinner and some great stories just adds a very special dimension to the online relationships that Web 2.0 enables. (Even as I wrote that last sentence, it really hit me just how amazing these connections are and how much connectivity comes out of what seem to be fairly tenuous links... I guess that's the strength of weak ties.)

As we sat chatting we marveled at the ease with which tools like Twitter and Skype enabled us to make connections and then organise and coordinate an event like this, but the real lesson that I took from the experience was to remind myself that these networks we create are NOT about computers and technology, they are about PEOPLE. Especially for those others who just look on at what we do, who see us spending lots of time in front of a computer, it very easy to overlook the fact that we are not spending all this time just tapping on a keyboard and interacting with bits and bytes, chips and circuits... we are interacting with real, flesh-and-blood, honest-to-goodness people.

Of course, if any of you are ever in Sydney then we should meet up. I know this great little café in Newtown...

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tagged as: barbara dieu, chris betcher, edubloggers, judy o'connell, real life 6 Comments

26Nov/074

My Grandmother's Country

Just wanted to share this Voicethread that some of my students did (there are still more kids to add their voices yet). In my Year 7 art class we were looking at the work of contemporary Australian aboriginal artist Sally Morgan, and the students had to examine a painting called My Grandmother's Country. We had quite a long discussion about it in class and looked at some of the symbolism used in the painting. The students then had to write a response to the work.

In the past, this task is usually done purely as a text-only task... it gets discussed in class and they then do the writing at home. I thought I'd try using Voicethread instead, because it allowed them to access the artwork from home, to zoom in to see detail, and to hear me re-explain what they needed to do with it. (I know, I know, YOUR students never forget anything you tell them in class, but mine sometimes do).

They were a bit shy about leaving voice comments at first, so instead they wrote a written response as usual, but many said it was really useful being able to hear the task explained again from home. After they submitted the written task, which I thought they mostly did pretty well, I got them to record some of their responses as audio files which we uploaded to Voicethread along with their photo. This ability to upload audio to Voicethread instead of having to record it directly onto the page is a feature of a Voicethread Pro account, which is available to educators at no cost. I found it made it so much easier to collect the audio comments, especially since this class is not in a room with computers. I use my MacBook Pro to record their audio to QuickTime, convert it to MP3 using QuickTime Pro, snap a photo using Photobooth and then I do the uploading after class or whenever it's convenient.

Anyway, for what it's worth, here are some of their observations so far... if you want to leave an encouraging (moderated) comment for them that would be wonderful...

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

It will be interesting to see if the quality of their speaking and recording changes once they realise that they have an audience...

PS: Thanks to @nzchrissy via @alannahk for pointing me to the solution to embedding these Voicethreads into the blog like this. Nice!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Filed under: Assessment, Creativity, My Tools, Podcasting, web2.0 4 Comments

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