Blog Post Web 2.0 Tools

The first phrase I heard when I asked about pod casting was that "Pod casting is evil and addicting." I thought it was just a joke until I started to get into all of the material that is available. Pod casting is not just being able to see or hear an article, newscast or interview, but the ability to subscribe and receive that material without having to track it down each time you want to listen to it. The overwhelming amount of information that is available is actually a bit intimidating so I thought I would start with some recreational material to get my feet wet; drum clinics. I ended up spending nine hours over the course of two days just setting up subscriptions to all of the drummers I like to study, however, it never occurred to me that I was going to have to find the time to watch all of this as it came down to me each week. After the second week of this experiment I had over twenty hours still to watch and found myself just deleting shows just to appear caught-up. The moral of this story is to make sure you only subscribe to the materials you need.

Now, with a more clear understanding of how to manage my subscriptions, I realize that pod casting can be utilized in a class room with some success. One way to use this tool would be to have the students create a “reflective” pod cast that would serve as a review covering what was learned on a weekly basis. Another possibility is for the teacher to create the pod cast review so that the students may archive the material, therefore, if a student is absent (which is quite often in DoDDS) the material is readily available and there will be less time involved in getting that student back up to speed with what was missed.
I must tell you, however, that iTunes alone has enough relevant material to keep one busy for years. Take the extra time to weed out those subscriptions that might appear useful, but deep down you know you will never get to them, or you will end up spending extra time going back and deleting files that you never listened to or watched.



iPod image from Also in Audio. Retrieved October 10, 2009 from: http://www.alsoinaudio.com/how/

I have been an avid user and fan of Gmail since the beginning of Google’s beta testing, however, it was only just recently that I started to play with Google Docs. Previously, the type of online document sharing was handled by Microsoft documents or spreadsheets and most often the file would lock or become corrupt when multiple people were accessing the file at once. Now with Google Docs, you not only do not even need to be on the same network, but you can safely have multiple people around the world accessing and modifying the document simultaneously, as was the case in the class last month.

Google Docs would be fairly easy to implement in any classroom. From group collaboration in a drama class (students editing their script) to an online wish-list of books that I could try to order for the library. Not being in a classroom limits my use of these items; however, it does not limit my ability to approach other teachers on staff to make recommendations during collaboration. Our Model United Nations class could benefit from Google Docs when a team is working on a proposal for their country. Our team working on Russia could collaborate on ways to stop human trafficking and not all students would have to be in school to assist with this work. Google Docs would really benefit some of our “home school” students that are in academic clubs, yet do not meet with the other students on a regular basis.
Google Docs may also allow students in the military community to keep track of items that we ship to deployed soldiers as “care packages” while allowing the soldiers to post their needs to the same document. This is a project that our ROTC program currently handles by keeping multiple slips of paper lying around in hopes that nothing gets lost.



Google Docs image from User Logos. Retrieved October 10, 2009 from: http://userlogos.org/node/1624





A tool that I had never been exposed to, before last month, is iPhoto. On the surface this application seemed to be a bit useless in the educational field as it appeared to be just another picture/graphic organizer; however, this is really not the case. The application iphoto will not just organize your pictures by date or category, but it will allow you to tag them by the location that they were taken as well as a face recognition function for who is in the picture.

Imagine teaching World History and assigning a project to your students that involves keeping a pictorial diary of Martin Luther King. The student can collect pictures throughout the life of their assigned person and not just tag them by who is in each picture, but have the pictures attached to Google Earth so that during a presentation the rest of the class would be able to see where each event took place in relation to every other event. This type of project would be very beneficial in team teaching as it could be modified to across curriculums to teach not just the geographic relationships but the cultural relationships around events as well.
One major drawback for this application is that my school district does not use Mac’s at this time but while using this application in my last class, I could envision numerous projects in Social Studies that could use not just iPhoto, but all applications in the iLife suite.


iPhoto image from IconSpedia. Retrieved October 10, 2009 from: http://www.iconspedia.com/icon/iphoto-7235.html