WoW!

As discussed in the last post, our class presented its WoW (Wonders of the Web) projects the other night in our final online class. My project topic was "Podcasting in the Classroom". I chose this topic because it was something I have started to see in the elementary school in which I work and so I wanted to learn more about it. Podcasting is an excellent venue for the elementary age because the student's expression of their learning does not rely heavily on writing skills that are just developing at that age.

I learned quite a bit about podcasting in the classroom. There was an absolute general consensus on all the sites I visited that learning how to create a podcast is easy. I would suggest visiting my reference sites as well as videos on Youtube before starting out. And there were quite a few deep resource sites, as indicated on the presentation. I was somewhat surprised that I could not find more. This is perhaps because of the newness of the idea of podcasting in the classroom or lack of technology in a classroom. Once you look at some of the podcasts presented in some of the resources, it is easy to become hooked as you see the value in excitement, engagement, learning and sharing that it adds to the learning experience.

I used a really interesting presentation tool called a Prezi, that our group had used for a project during the course. Because it is a unique form of presentation and involves manually controlled movement, it is very engaging. It is fun! There are some drawbacks. It is not as developed yet as other presentation tools. It cannot link to alternate sites and can only upload video from Youtube. However, it is a tool that I would definitely recommend to other teachers and my students as an avenue of presentation.

The other interesting tool is learned to use as a result of doing this presentation, was Jing/Screencast. Because we ran out of presentation time during our last class, we were asked to submit our presentations with a voice overlay to the class via our class forum, so that everyone could reap the full benefit of each student's presentation at a later date. This program allowed narration of the presentation via a screenshot with an audio overlay. It was very easy to download and use. I could see many various uses of this program, to help us develop tutorials for our students and their parents on how to use our websites, wikis, blogs, as well as academic tutorials.