Posted on August 21, 2006 at 3:43 PM in round-ups
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
A couple of weeks ago, Earthling reader John Blake asked for some more ideas about how teachers are using RSS and podcasting as part of their classroom practice. I'm fairly new to blogs about tech in the classroom, so I spent some time searching to see what I could dig up. It turns out I find this stuff pretty fascinating. I got a little far afield of the specific question of RSS in the classroom, but I found so many interesting links that I decided to broaden this round-up. Below you'll find a list of miscellaneous resources I found about tools, theory, and techniques for making best use of current web technologies in the classroom:
- First I have to include John's Junk EduBlog itself. It's a chronicle of his projects, approaches, and experiences as a teacher using RSS and podcasting. Reading about how these tools work in the real world for an end-user with a known, built-in audience and purpose can be a refreshing change from reading so much abstract analysis and opinion about the same tools.
- Edbloggernews - This is a digg-style user-submitted news site that specializes in education-related stories. It would be interesting to implement something like this at the classroom level, and it appears the technology behind it would let a teacher do just that. If anyone has done this, I'd love to see examples and hear about how it worked out. [via The Thinking Stick]
- EdTechTalk - This is a podcast that produces several episodes each week. According to their about page "EdTechTalk is a community of educators interested in discussing and learning about the uses of educational technology." Anyone can call in via Skype to participate in the discussions.
- NECC 2006 Podcasts - Judging by the blogs I read, NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) would have been one of *the* conferences to go to this year about technology in the classroom. They've published many of the sessions as podcasts, including subjects like "Choose Your Own Wiki Adventure: Using Wikis with K-12 Students" and "Electronic Constructivism: Compelling Ideas, Engaging Resources, A Dozen Ready-to-Use Techniques". You can get to all of them here.
- Weblogg-ed - This is Will Richardson's blog, who also created Edbloggernews above. I've seen references to his recent book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms throughout the "edublogosphere".
- Matthew Williams asks some good questions about how and why to use RSS in the classroom.
- ESL Handouts Feed - Here's a feed of free ESL handouts and lesson plans.
- Academhack writes about a project that brought blogging into the classroom for 60 university students in a writing class.
- Ebyblog writes about an article analyzing the use of Podcasting at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. Here's one of the interesting points: "One of the first findings was that most students seemed to prefer audio over video, which they attribute to being more portable. This is despite the students actually originally requesting video, which shows that it’s worthwhile doing more indepth studies like this."
As I come across more stuff I'll be collecting it in the myFavorites RSS in the classroom tag.