For the eTwinning exchanges the British Council offers some eTwinning project assistance and I have developed material for them on behalf of TheConsutlants-E

A few months ago I setup this podOmatic tutorial for teachers using podomatic itself as an alternative to the print copy

Here’s the link http://tutorial.podomatic.com/

There are some podcasts from teachers using podcasts in their exchange projects http://www.britishcouncil.org/etwinning-podcasts.htm

Good stuff!

technorati tags:podomatic, podcast, eTwinning

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· What opportunities do you see podcasting being able to offer you in your educational setting?

Generally speaking they offer language learners the chance to practice two essential skills: speaking and listening. The content is flexible as they can create it or they can choose from a wider choice of ready available podcasts to listen to.

I feel there is a multi-strand here and we need to remember the context and learning level, outcomes, styles and resources we have available.

Podcasting can offer:

a) Authentic Listening: learners listen to real-life audio content (created by others) Great new opportunities for listening – very much like a more flexible and menu-selected range of audio files tailored to our learners’ needs

b) Real Audience: learners record their own voices and content. The listeners soon become speakers and can post audio comments in reply to what they hear. New ways of recording voices ( a great improvement on the tape recorder) which allows learners added speaking practice and the possibility of sharing their voice new audience and new levels of interaction with that audience new horizons to suit some learning styles better than text communication

c) Audio-on-the-go: lecturer podcasts to catch up on seminar or lesson you missed, tutorial for so many subjects, homework assignments, more listening practice, mp3 files on lessons or relevant topics to integrate or review material covered in class.

Learners can use their PC to listen to it or download and store this audio content to their portable music players in their own time, as many times as they want. Repetition easy and integral.

As I said in the round table discussion tonight on Podcasting & Language Learning hosted by Scott Lockman and in the YG discussion I have used podcasting with learners mainly as a listening resource. The main reason for this is they are academic university students and we do not have recording facilities. Podcasting also requires a lot of time – practising and repeating “parts”, uploading, editing etc which many short exam courses do not allow.

These new resources are much more than just more listening. They are excellent for exposing to a huge range of accents, speaking styles in a click. They are fun like http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/ and quick to follow. For young learners there are issues with level and appropriacy (see Graham and Joe for more info!)

With one class I even found they were interested in listening to the same podcast in several languages. A lot of government information is now accessible as a podcast. For academic students, who have a command of many languages and are training to be interpreters, translators or whatever this is fantastic. Take the one I did on the environment for example from the EU Climate change site http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/campaign/ My students found it great to be able to listen to the other languages they are studying after listening to the English one (at the Oriental University of Naples the students I teach will have English is their second language, an Asian language will be their third and maybe fourth and fifth will be Latvian and Portuguese or some other European mix )

I have also trained teachers to set up podcasts. On a recent face to face project training we developed an idea for a project that will be carried out in the UK with mobile podcasting. The idea is called “Talk a Walk” and it is to record their learners’ trip to London in a new perspective, through sound.

These are some of the ideas we brainstormed: London with difficulty/ London in different shoes/ London through other senses. I think it was pretty neat to allow these students to choose the theme, to work in separate groups and then to help them develop it. This is not always possible, we were lucky that this EU funded projects covers the cost of going to the UK. Lucky for some J I just do the training ;-( So the “through senses podcasts” will be on describing art: wall graffiti to Tate Gallery, or describing the food they see and try. The oral record will be done as a substitute to our travel log scrap books! If the school could get the money for videocasting tools that would be ideal but sometimes just voice with no images makes the dialogues or spoken comments richer and for teachers new to ICT it can be easier – although vlogging is getting very simple.

· How effectively do you think you can engage students with something like a podcast?

· What (if any) problems can you foresee that may result in your podcast project not becoming a success? What can you do to avoid them?

Listen here for my answers (podcasting from Odeo to familiarise myself with it after a long time 😉

http://odeo.com/show/8536743/1060891/download/EVO2007Week4ReflectionsOnPodcasting.mp3

Or try this

powered by ODEO

metalab040207

Originally uploaded by Valentina 24.

We had a great time experimenting with uploading slides and dragging and dropping (while holding CTR key down!) to the Interactive Whiteboards kinldy assigned to us by Fire Centaur in English Village in Second Life.
educating the educators
I thought I’d try uploading this from Flikr to see if all these ways of uploading work smoothly.

On 02/02/07 (midnight my time) we were privileged to be able to hear Alex Hayes  involved in LearnScope projects across NSW talk and showcase social software usage in these projects. “Webpublishing is a clear and defined objective.”

Bee, Berta, Patricia, Gerogina, Anne, Laine and a few other OWP names were there.

It was very interesting first to use this new real-time software that I have seen demos of and analysezd features of but never actually used synchronously in order to compare it with live chat rooms I’m familair with (LearningTimes, Blackboard, Vyew). Until the 01 Feb 2007 it was known as Breeze but since 01/02/07 (i.e 24hours before our session!) it became known as Adobe Acrobat Connect

It’s a rich platform for synchronous sessions.

• Good professional layout with nice easy push buttons to ask for microphone and split windows.
• Alex referred to is as very “democratic” because participants could also resize presenter’s windows. I think I would disagree with this definition. It’s not that democratic because it’s a paid for service!! It’s very professional.
  
• We were participating as presenters and had been given access to the chat room via a shared link (no password) but one can set this up so that participants need a password and cannot share the applications (PPT slides or browser unless granted permission by moderator)
  
• We were all “presenters” as it were and that yes, was very democratic of Alex. Thanks! With a larger, less experienced, group it could have lead to collapsing windows.

It’s nice to have shared browsing and although I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and this learning opportunity I found that the shared browsing didn’t work so well on this occasion and caused problems:

1. some degree of detachment
2. text too small,
   
3. passage from web page to web page too fast to actually appreciate more than the basic layout and a few pics or headings. (Maybe I’m used to active web browsing, meandering round a wikispace to observe all the hard work and collaborative efforts that have gone on behind the scenes in my own way, in my own time, in an hour it is not possible to cover all that. )

Alex did a great job but I’m wondering about this quantity and exposing remote participants in this way.

I feel that a presenter, in this situation, is best

• outlining projects in a different way (not only verbally) and
  
• providing URL for later individual enjoyment and greater engagement.
  
• talking thorugh key points on a whiteboard or slide or
  
• ensuring that the webpage opens full screen (which then loses the sidebar chat – a disadvantage)
  

I think Laine, may agree with me here as she said in the text chat she felt confuse. The audio on Alex’s microphone was not of constant high quality adding to the distancing of the experiencing and the need for better visuals.

However, don’t get me wrong the session was extremely successful and enjoyable in extending networks and really interesting from the point of view of seeing how funding and technology can assist some brilliant projects and connect people. A real example of knowledge sharing.

It was also a special moment to actually hear a moblogger (mobile blogger) speak “live”!

Alex said he started out with photo blogging and then moved to expressing himself in text. A lot of his work is done on the go. This is a form of technology and use of technology that is very avant-guard here in Italy. He showed us how the use of Flikr captured their learning journey http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/nswlearnscope06

Some important issues were also mentioned about protecting and preserving indigenous languages through mp3 recordings and podcasting. The public photo or storage of voice recordings has met with many problems in mobile blogging projects. It is crucial that people’s traditions are respected and if the capturing of an image of oneself or the archiving of a voice of someone who has passed away is considered by that community as unacceptable then that must obviously be respected. There is, of course also, a generation aspect to this – younger learners being more interested in becoming involved and exploring new traditions, more open to change? But the older members of the community need to be part of the decision making process for any project like this to work and Alex explained how they worked in a “watermark” system for granting permission for photos to be used. This protection is in the hands of the community and it great to analyse all this from the point of view of open and participatory (of our past few weeks) I need to find out more about what Alex said on Creative Common’s.

We also got the chance (very helpful) to see how Alex has set up and uses Bloglines for aggregating the thousands of feeds all his projects are using . He shared his bloglines public space http://www.bloglines.com/public/alexanderhayes

Superb example of folder management and an excellent way to consolidate and see in action more examples of what we have been examining over the past two weeks.

Problems with Bloglines, mentioned by Alex :

• That the interface does not allow you to view all the updates on one window.
  
• You can see changes marked by individual feeds – to view you need to click that feed.

He mentioned that Planet TALO does this so I’m off to investigate. Another feed scraper (I liked this term!) was a community based portal called www.zimbio.com. Another one for the comparative analysis tasks that I have set myself!

Another interesting thing was the way they had used a Google calendar in their wiki to make even scheduling visits more collaborative – less of a top down approach

Also nice to see great “HowTo“ links and their idea of sending a Web Office Tool Kit to everyone involved in projects seemed great.

Well the key words : teams, collaborating, networks and also unpredictability. One mobile bloggers choice for their “personal identity” activities showed that 😉

Connections and conversations http://www.nswlearnscope.com/

Loads of scope for learning… Thanks ALex, Bee, Patricia and Georgian for arranging this session 😉

I thought I’d experiment with inserting a YouTube video into my blog and I’ve chosen this one on Second Life called One Climate Island a virtual world in Second Life dedicated to practical solutions to climate change. It’s linked to the wiki and blog space at

[youtube]njKRjCLQYkI[/youtube]