Working through the School Year Pt. 1

Yes, I can believe it has been since June that I made a post. Summer flew by (my daughter got married!) and the school year started before I realized it. If you are reading this and are a teacher I know you understand.

Tools I am using this year:
Trying to get my kiddos competent in the basic Office products. They do a really nice job and I've been using GCFlearnFree.org for my middle school students. Love the lesson! Easy to follow directions, good pace and show what a finished product should look like. A very valuable (and FREE) site to use. They offer other lessons also so be sure to investigate what they have on the site.

Digital Citizenship
Now there's a loaded topic. I have been working with this for about a month now.

I use the NetSmartz site (kids and teens). They have a lot of good resources for educators and parents.
I had my middle schoolers working in the Be Internet Awesome from Google site. Very fun.
We also used the Nearpod lessons from Common Sense Media. I bought the lessons and find it was a very good purchase. The lessons and resources are well done.
And now I am going to try the FBI- Safe Online Surfing. So many options. Just trying to speak it in as many ways as I can to get the point across and hope they made good choices in their lives.

Google Doodles

I often tell teachers don't zip past those Google Doodles because they can be a great stepping stone to a good discussion or lesson. For instance, today's doodle celebrates the birthday of Oskar Fischinger. And to my point, I have no idea who he was or what he did. So naturally I go explore, which is what educators encourage their students to do, or at least I hope you do. CNET describes him as a "filmmaker and abstract animator". There is a lot to learn about him and the work he did which was clearly ahead of his time.  Do not jump past those doodles. You might abandon your lesson for the day but anytime you encourage learning and discovering new things is never a bad thing. #lifelonglearner


Kreise (excerpt) by Oskar Fischinger from CVM on Vimeo.

Summertime!

Well I think we can all agree that I am not very good at this blog writing thing but I persist. More to come! Just had to squeeze in a line before it was too bad.

End of Semester and Awesome Podcasts

So apparently it was a busy first semester of the school year as evidenced by my lack of writing. WOW.
I seem to apologize often for my lack of writing. I don't think I am really cut out for this but hey, I try.

What did I accomplish this first part of the school year? Well....I'd have to say that one of the best things were podcasts. Turned out really well but here were the challenges:
1- my students have their own Microsoft Surface devices so I wanted them to be able to use them to create the podcast. Problem- How to record?
2-Audio editing. Yeah, a whole bag of problems there.
3- I needed a place to host the podcasts. Problem- Free? Ease of publishing? Safety/privacy of my students?
And how did all this work out?
1- OneNote has an audio record feature within the program. Unfortunately we were not getting good recordings using the built in microphone (who knows why? they are kids.) so we ended up attaching my Blue Yeti mic. Worked great. Love this microphone.
2- Editing- We needed to add music which we got from bensound.org at the beginning and ending of the podcast. I prefer to use Audacity but that was not an option. I tried finding some other things but I wasn't happy with what I found. We ended up pulling the music and the audio into a Chrome app called Beautiful Audio Editor and it worked perfectly. We were able to save it as a project and reopen it later. We also were able to download it as a wave file which we then converted to an mp3 for easier upload to where we were posting the podcasts. Which by the way, we used Audio Converter from 123Apps. Also was super easy to use. Our creating process was not as challenging as it started out looking to be despite all the bumps in the road.
3- Where to post? I have used other sites before like Podbean and others but I just didn't like the fact that their podcasts were located where they could access other podcasts that were not necessarily those I wanted them to find. Remember, these were 7th graders. Solution? I am a major Edmodo user and created a group just for our podcasts. I am the only member and I made all the posts BUT I made all the posts public. That way anyone with the link to the Edmodo group could listen to the podcasts. By the way- the podcasts were all on Social Justice Leaders and probably would not interest anyone but other teachers, parents and well that pretty much sums up the list so I was not so much concerned about "gee now the whole world can hear your podcasts". This platform gave them the publishing they needed but in a very controlled world. And if you would like to hear the podcasts you can follow this link: SPS Podcasts Unfortunately though there seems to be an Edmodo glitch and even though there are 21 posts you can only see the first half of them. When you click on load more posts it won't. Boo hiss. So what was and is a great way to post podcasts safely for your students has this one very important problem. I've contacted Edmodo but still no solution. Again- boo hiss.