Category: Ed Tech

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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.

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When Everything Looks Like a Nail

The regularity of my blogging has dropped off a bit lately, mainly because I’m in the middle of writing a book about the use of interactive whiteboard technology for teachers. Although I’ve got almost 20,000 words written so far, I am way behind deadline and really need to get the first draft finished so it can be submitted to the publishers in a few weeks. Until I get that done, every time I feel the urge to blog I have to remind myself that there is a (new) deadline looming and direct my writing efforts to the book instead of the blog. I feel bad that my blogging has been suffering lately, but I really need to get this done. So there you have the reason I’ve not been updating lately.

However, I simply had to take a few minutes to share this wonderful new tool I’ve found called Scrivener. It’s an incredible tool for anyone taking on a large writing task and I really can’t believe I’ve never tried it before. I had heard the name mentioned but assumed it was just another word processor. How wrong I was!

There is an assumption that the defining software tool for writers is Microsoft Word. While Word is a very powerful application and has many, many features that most people never even discover, Word can be a frustrating tool for anyone contemplating the writing of a very long piece of work such as a book. I use Word a lot and know it quite well… in fact I hold a Advanced level Microsoft Office Specialist certification in Word, so I feel quite at home in it. I can generally twist Word to my will and make it do pretty much whatever I need, but it’s still a pain in the neck when working on something as large and fragmented as a book.

There’s no doubt that Word is a great tool for certain types of writing. But as they say, when your only tool is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail.

Enter Scrivener. Designed expressly for anyone working on long documents that require many edits, such as books and screenplays, Scrivener takes an entirely different approach to writing. Essentially, it treats easch writing task as a project, collecting resources for writing into a single place and then enables you to break long text into short, movable, definable chunks, letting you categorise and synopsise each chunk and assemble them into the final work. You can break text into chapters, scenes, paragraphs, sentences… whatever you like… and move them around to let your ideas flow far better than Word will ever allow. Unfortunately Scrivener is a Mac only application, but Windows users might like to check out PageFour which apparently does similar things.

Using Scrivener has been somewhat of an eye-opening paradigm shift for me. It has challenged my assumptions about the very nature of the software tools we give our students. It made me realise what a mistake it is to assume that Word – or any “industry standard” software tool – is necessarily the tool for the job as far as student use is concerned. We inflict tools like Word on our students because they are supposed to be “what everybody uses” and we insist that the best tools to teach them to use are the tools used “by industry”. The fact is, schools are not offices, and the writing needs of a business person are not necessarily the writing needs of a student. The best tool for a student is not the one that they will use when they get older, but the one that helps them do what they need to do right now.

There is nothing “wrong” with Word, but having now spent some time with Scrivener it is now painfully obvious just how much more we could offer our students if we stopped assuming the tools of the business world were what they should master in order to create written texts. Real writing is a process of collecting ideas and thoughts together, manipulating them into a cohesive form, and editing and re-editing them until they make sense to other people. I now see how tools such as Scrivener approach the task of writing from a completely different angle and enable it to take place in a far more fluid way.

Now back to work! I have a book to finish…

PS: Here’s a video that gives a great overview of what Scrivener is all about…

video overview

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Becoming a Moodle Dude

Julian Ridden training in MoodleSome 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!