mikes web log

Off to sunny Torquay. Snow showers threatened but an interesting programme (for once).

One of the delights of being married to a teacher is to hear each day the stories of the classroom. There are a myriad of stories as one would expect when 30 young people (Yr 3 in this instance) interact with the dominant adult in an enclosed space for all of 6hrs each day. Over the year each child becomes an individual as the day to day picture paints them into your memory. This is one such short story. This 8yr old had a history within the school of being poor at mathematics. In the previous years she had been marked down as a reluctant and recalcitrant mathematician.

On this Monday morning she had returned after missing the previous weeks teaching due to a holiday commitment. The maths work that Monday morning was challenging and surprisingly the child managed the work very successfully. However on the Tuesday when challenged by the maths she failed to respond. She was behaving in her ‘normal’ mode.

Gina (my wife) decided to challenged her parents about the Monday and Tuesday performance. The outcome was an admission from the parents that two years previously they had been told about their daughters poor attainment in maths. As a result they imposed a regime of half an hours maths every evening before their daughter went to bed. They admitted this was not a very nice time and inevitably ended in arguments. Gina’s advice (in front of the daughter) was basically to say ‘lay off’, she can do it, she is capable, she had proven this in school (on the Monday).

At the end of the week Gina received a letter written and delivered by the daughter. It is copied below.

Dear Miss ………. 

I am writing to tele you that …I likle Mathes Becuase last night I askt my mum if I could do some mathes she said yes So I did. I went thro carfl and I didn’t have eney aregyoumants with my mum ether. So that night When I was In bed I thout to myself Ida can do it Just likle you said. 

Love From 

Don’t know if anybody is interested. Here is my account of creating a podcast.

Podcasting – How to.
Not easy. But I’ll have a go at explaining how . It will be good experience.
 
Step1: Life is never easy.
I did think this was the most difficult step. Getting the children to record the material. As an experimental podcast I didn’t want to intrude on class time for the year 6 I was working with. SAT’s are only 8 weeks away! I needed to create the podcast and then I could use it as a convincing argument to get some class time. The kids were very enthusiastic and wrote loads of material. The trouble was finding the lunch times, playtimes, after school times, breakfast club time when I could get into the school to record their efforts.
 
Like others I used Audacity. Yet again I didn’t find this easy. I used a £4 stick mike and it probably shows in the final product. I think I will visit Maplins and purchase a slightly more expensive  device. Audacity has its funny quirks. You have to save your project before you can do anything with it. I was confused by the multi-track recording. After finishing this bit of blogging I might have a go at constructing a coherent set of notes on how to use it in its simplest form. Managed though and got to the MP3 stage.
 
Step 2  Inspiration
 
The inspiration for a podcast came from the Down’s school example. It’s brilliant. They have just tried their first vodcast. Again brilliant. I picked it up using iTunes. Go to Advanced and select Subscribe to Podcast type in http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDownsFM. iTunes will automatically pick up the feed.
 
Step 4 First Stage of dispair
 
You have an MP3 file (5Mb for a 7 min. broadcast).Then what are feeds? What is RSS? A colleague helped immensely. The best way to establish a feed is to use a blog. No idea why? So I used the blogspot environment to establish another blog. http://princealbertpodcasts.blogspot.com.
 
When you have created the blog you start posting. It’s important that you set up the posting correctly because this influences the way in which the podcast is eventually displayed in iTunes. Took me a long time to sort this out. Create a title for the posting … in this instance it’s Podcast 1 for the Down’s school they used Series 2 – Show 1.  In the posting area you then type the brief description of the podcast. Select it all and then hyperlink the description to the place where you have placed the podcast. I choose a MyInternet PLUS homepage because of the size of uploads it can accommodate. I haven’t tried uploading to the blog (don’t think the blogspot blogging environment allows it).
 
Stage 3 More hopeful
 
You go to Feedburner at http://www.feedburner.com and create an account. Amazingly all free. There are some nice folks out there. When you go into Feedburner you are asked for your blogs address. Put it in and then click next. You are then asked to create your account. After that you have some details to fill in. Look at them carefully. At one point you are asked for details of your podcast. These details will appear in ITunes alongside the podcast title. Why careful? There seems no way back to edit these details. To my cost I had to delete the whole of the feed and start again because I missed this section and ended up with ‘Add here a detailed description…..’ next to my podcast title.
 
Stage 4  Finish
 
At the end you are presented with a feed address, a bit like the one in the link. This is what you feed into iTunes and lo and behold there is your podcast, hopefully all nicely setup and ready to go.
 

The keynote speaker had arrived early. he used the extra time to list the first names of all the members of the audience in alphabetical order. At the start of the lecture he displays the names on automatic scroll. He then announces that at some point he will stop the scroll and ask the highlighted name about their ideas on education (not quite that but a really difficult question). The audience shows all the effects of fear. There is however some relief as the automatic scrolling passes the M (M for Michael) …brilliant its not going to be me. He then says that its easy to make it scroll in the other direction. More fear. He slows the scrolling so it becomes even more fearful and he never really asks the question of an individual. Message … no learning can take place under stress.

Brilliant but what a turn around. The school which I am very closely associated with uses a similiar technique. How do you get kids to listen? You get 30 lolly sticks and write in each stick the name of a pupil. The lolly sticks go into a jar so that when you start to question the kids about the learning experience you take a stick from the jar and ask that child the question. Brilliant concept …it really encourages  listening but now what else does it do?

 Maybe I shouldn’t go to these inspiring talks.

Go to I tunes. Go to Podcasts and then Advanced on the top bar. Go to Subscribe an add the link http://feeds.feedburner.com/The PrinceAlbertPodcasts.

Im not a tecci. I am an enthusiast. This causes me immense problems. Podcasting is the  present problem.Podcasting is a brilliant concept. It allows the podcaster to do so many things which could be of immense educational value. Schools can export their excellence. Pupils can perform in a variety of ways. Teachers can use it for teaching. It has the potential of being a very powerful tool. Is it ready for general use. No way.

The kids did the most difficult bit. they produced the podcast material then performed it. Brilliant. Recording with Audacity was almost OK - although Audacity has its quirks and does need some previewing. In the end the production of the MP3 file was relatively easy.

How do you now convert this to a podcast. Firstly one has to grasp the concept of an RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication……Simple, simple….what on earth is simple about this. Apparently a podcast needs this so how do you fix it. Simple, you go to somebody who knows! My colleague was brilliant and produced a set of notes that took me through the process of making this wonderful MP3 file into a podcast. Firstly you need to create an XML feed (What is an XML feed – never mind …maybe I don’t need to know). To do this you can create a post within your blogger account. Great I had one, this one, maybe I could use that. Maybe this was a really good use of a blogger account! In the posting you create a link to the MP3 file. Brilliant can do that. Next step please.

Go to FeedBurner. Why. What is Feedburner? You register and then create a feed address. you then choose a Chicklet. Is this a new word for the Oxford Dictionary? When you create it you are not really sure what it does and it involves changing the settings of your blog. Which you cannot do with this blog. So maybe you need another blog. So back to the beginning however was that necessary? Who knows.

Eventually you end up with a couple of addresses that could be fed into Itunes so that it can receive you podcast.

When is somebody going to make this a single button job. Come on you out there help the likes of me. We don’t need to go through this mess. This is a wonderful tool it meets all sorts of educational objectives make it happen for us.

This will be the first of a series of podcasts from Prince Albert Primary School in Aston England.  It is intended to be a community podcast. Go to ITunes click on Podcast. Go to Advanced. Click on Subscribe to Podcasts and then put in the following URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePrinceAlbertPodcasts

This is going to be a busy week. I wish somebody had warned me about using Studio 10 on a PC. I almost lost my work this evening. If I had done the panic bells would have started ringing. In Birmingham we are running some KS3 (11-14) activities and I have some responsibility for the science work. (Visit www.bgfl.org for the others). We are presenting the concept of gravity in five different formats ; Video conference lesson, paper document, home experiment, film and animation and asking the pupils to look at them and then vote on what learning experience they prefered. Its crudely based on the beloved Gardeners learning styles and will be better next time when we try to do the next concept to music. Where does the 42 come from? I’m intrigued by an Australian idea where they link the learning styles to Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive skills and end up with a matrix of 42 squares with different activities in them. The pupils can then map their preferences. It is also the answer to the really important question!

Almost there. I reckon the worst thing about podcasting is getting the stuff from the pupils, When you are dealing with a school who is coming to grips with the concept it is difficult to persuade them to give up time for the project. particularly if you are aiming for year 6 with the SAT’s on the horizon. The recording and writing has therfoore been at lunchtime, breaktime and breakfast club. But I have it, even a jingle so with Audacities compliance it may be ready by the end of this week. A big learning curve.

Why do I do these things?

I’m involved in this very interesting project in Aston in Birmingham UK. Aston is one of the poorest areas in the UK (the 16th poorest). The community is mainly Asian from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Over the last two years we have been running a pilot where we have been putting computers with Internet access into homes. The Internet access is filtered and is exactly the same as the schools get. The objective of the pilot was to raise the ICT skills of the adults using the pupils in a local school as the adult trainers. It has been a fascinating project and the great thing is that I have really begun to have some understanding of the community…… or more likely they have begun to have some understanding of me. Each computer has about ten users. Each family seems to consist of at least five children, two parents , two grandparents and some nephews and nieces who live either next door or across the road. For whatever reason computers didn’t seem to rate highly in their lives even though they had high aspirations for their children when it comes to education. You also had the problem of home language versus English language. When the kids get home they are faced with their home language for communication and entertainment. We must thank Sky for that. They also go to Mosque school on Saturdays. They therefore had a pretty full life before the computer even arrived in their home. A bit like the ‘English family’ in the 50’s. The computer invariably now plays an important part in their lives ( are we spoiling it for them). It is usually in a central place in the house and has to have timetabled use and when things go wrong there is a great clamour to sort the problem out.

The project has just got the go ahead for an extension. We are now going to put a computer , with connectiuvity, into the house of all Year 3 children linked to three schools in Aston (210 pupils) and some year 7 (probably 90). This will enable the schools to ignore the digital divide for these pupils and begin to assess there real educational value. Maybe by Year 4 they will be typing with all ten fingers…at once!