Category Archives: social networking

Student Blog Highlights, Homework-Free Update, and Free Podcast Hosting and Embedding

My last post‘s experiment with embedding Archive.org‘s audio player failed. Somebody in the forums was kind enough to point me to the help page showing how to get the player to include a playlist, so now I can share — and also share some mild ecstasy at the quality of learning and student blogging in my new (almost-) homework-free classroom.

Using Archive.org for Podcast Files

This is so worth sharing. Those of you geeky long enough to have been burned when once-free hosting services went premium-only (e.g., Ning), belly-up, or whatever, don’t need me to tell you that a free host committed to remaining free — and well-funded enough to honor that commitment — is hugely important. Otherwise, hours, weeks, months, and years of building content can go up in smoke.

So Archive.org seems to be a very fine solution — especially for audio (vids can go on Youtube, Vimeo, Blip, whatever, but audio-only seems strangely less welcome on most sites). Its “about” page lays our that it’s a non-profit with very strong institutional support and a mission to be around forever, so I don’t fear getting burned again.

Lecturing Alone

As I mentioned last post, I prefer to lecture alone by simply recording voice memos on my iPhone when the spirit moves: distracted students don’t distract me, and don’t distract students who want to listen. Students can also listen when the spirit moves them. It’s win-win. So I made a channel on Archive.org, the iPhone Analects, and uploaded all my voice memos to them. They have a nifty batch upload function that makes the job fast and easy. **Warning: Don’t use iTunes’ AAC format, because Archive.org won’t convert them for play in the Audio Player. Using .mp3 worked for me, and iTunes will convert AAC to mp3 with a click. Search help or the menu options and it’s easy to figure out.**

Voice memos can also be a way to differentiate and extend for those who want to go further or deeper. I don’t assign most of what I record; I simply invite those who like the stuff we’re learning to listen to a sincere adult think aloud about the stuff because he likes it too — and doesn’t speak like a textbook, encyclo- or wiki-pedia, but instead like a person with questions, hypotheses, insights, curiosities, emotions, jokes, and wonder about it all. As one student put it in my class, “you’re further down the path than we are, and seem more to be learning with us than teaching us what you’ve finished learning.” That’s a paraphrase, but a faithful one. That kid nailed it. (And I thank the Big Lump* for giving me the best three Chinese history classes this semester that I’ve ever had. We do teach each other by discussing this stuff together. I do see new things they show me that turn on light bulbs left and right. It’s worth the early grave because the extra work makes the present so much finer. See this class blog post for links to some wonderful student blog reflections on our three hours reading original Taoist texts. And note that this writing is done at home, while in class we read together without computers, and discuss it without computers. They use the computers at home to blog about the f2f in class. And the quality of writing this semester is way more insightful than in the past. It’s their only homework. We do all reading in class together. I’m italicizing because dammit, I love this, and so do they. We’re working less and learning more, and more enjoyably at that.)

Embedding the History of China Podcast Player, with Full Playlist First:

–the tricky part: you have to add playlist code to the basic embed code. Archive.org’s audio tips page explains how.

Embedding the Podcast Player with Single Tracks:

“Sentimental Confucius”:

Not perfect — it doesn’t include the file name, for example — but they seem to be working on improving it (and again, see the audio tips page to see how to change the code for single tracks).

Closing Shots

I’m now encouraging students who feel like they’re stronger talkers than writers to make their own Archive.org accounts and embed their own talks on their class blogs. So far, only one has taken me up on it — a great, smart kid who I love listening to in class, and who does seem to shine more brightly in speech than in script.

And for the social kids who would rather discuss than write or talk solo, I’m looking into Oovoo as a free Skype alternative that records video conferences cross-platform. Our school is 1:1, but doesn’t (yet, I pray daily) mandate a single machine, so this Mac and PC-compatible free download is a Big Lump-send.*

—
*What’s this “Big Lump”? It’s Ivanhoe’s and Van Norden’s translation of what Zhuangzi calls the Tao, from which all the myriad things — life, the universe, and everything (including us) — emerges, and to which it all reverts. I love the creative freedom of this translation, and how it has fun with Zhuangzi’s ideas by matching them with similarly fun English wordplay.

Homework: To Flip? or to Toss?

Forays into Flipping

I’ve been edublog silent for a long time now, but buzz about the Flipped Classroom actually hit me human-to-human instead of via the interwebs. Teachers in my school are experimenting with it way out here in this Texan colony that is northern Singapore.

When it comes to social studies, though, I have a hard time seeing how assigning at-home readings for extension in class – a pretty traditional approach in history classrooms, in my experience – is not already “flipped.”

I did toy with the idea of flipping my classroom over the summer, though, was briefly active on the FC Ning, and played with podcasting and vodcasting content as homework during the first quarter of this school year. The experience left me with

concerns that students read even less than many already do, possibly undercutting their readiness for college and adulthood generally, which expects advanced reading skills (but I could be wrong here; when I was in high school, I never read assigned hw because I wanted to read more interesting things like sci-fi and — if you laugh at the next one, you haven’t read the research — ’70s-era Marvel Comics);
hard-won appreciation for how time-consuming the creation of quality podcasts or vodcasts is, and relatedly –
ditto for how sadistic and morale-killing, good intentions aside, a poorly made teacher podcast or video can be.

I’ll add that students have overall volunteered their appreciation for image-enhanced podcasts. Last September, walking home from school after classes all day on Chinese philosophies, enjoying a thinker’s high about Confucius and the gonzo Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi (“Jesus doing stand-up comedy” is the best hook I can come up with), I sat under a tree and tried to share that high with my students in a talk into my iPhone voice recorder — the first 12 minutes on Confucianism, the last 12 on Taoism. I went home, slapped some images on top of the audio in Garageband (and took a photo from my 16th floor apartment of the very tree under which those thoughts found voice), and that was that:

Another similar “walk and talk” into that machine about “what goodness means” to a Hindu, a Hebrew monotheist, and a traditional Chinese person for my ninth-graders:

These got good feedback (“It’s interesting” is a nice review of homework, as is “it helped things make sense”). Occasionally students have emailed me special requests on topics we’ve covered in units since those efforts. I’m pretty convinced I’m more interesting talking into my iPhone than trying to deliver the same ideas live in front of the class. I’m less distracted by the clowns and corpses, more focused on the ideas, and less inhibited in letting my own impassioned interest come out.

But man, editing images in in Garageband takes a lot of time, and that time is just not available. I keep thinking I should go minimalist and do audio-only podcasts, and gauge student response. If still good, that’s much easier to pull off. Another option I’ve considered is having students collaborate with me by finding images for the audio lectures, and making them edit them into AV podcasts. Yet another possibility is to assign a crowdsourced transcript of the lecture by having each student transcribe, say, one minute of the audio lecture. 30 students could do 30 minutes and slap it all together on a Google Doc or wiki. That would provide a text that could replace the boring textbook.

But this semester my interests have changed. I want my students to have time to sit under trees too.

(Next to) No Homework: The Sweet Spot?

My current experiment involves not so much flipping homework as (almost) ending it. I’m using document-based lessons in which all reading and discussion is done in class, and the only homework is a reflective blog post about the day’s content on a team blog — which student team-members read and comment on with corrections, extensions, challenges, etc. I like this so far, for several reasons:

it ensures all have actually done the reading and received the input (never a certainty with homework assignments)
it ensures, moreover, that more students have actually understood the deeper implications of the readings, through the discussions clarifying the concepts and understandings following our read-alouds (we’re currently reading 3,000-year-old Western Zhou Dynasty passages from the Confucian Five Classics that bring out the teachings of Confucianism more powerfully than any textbook summary can, but that require close reading and clarification. So we read, stop, ask, and discuss; read, stop, ask, and discuss)
it eliminates the “I read it last night but forgot most of it after waking up” that is as true for many adults as it is for students. We read and annotate based on front-loaded questions/reading purposes, take a couple of minutes to gather our impressions, and launch into talks with it all fresh in memory
it makes the student peer-teaching via comments on the team blog more reliable (they read it and discussed it with the teacher’s guidance in class, so odds are at least two in a five-person team comprehended the finer points of the lesson and can reinforce them in blog comments by catching and addressing misunderstandings in their peers’ posts)

The short version: we read homework in class, discuss it in class, clarify and debate it in class — then briefly write about it at home. Hopefully this leads to less homework and deeper learning at the same time — and above all, to less aversion to school because of all that homework.