Audioboo is not a new service or a new app, but it is a good app. It is a great tool to use on your iOS devices and also as a web based service to capture student voice. And for that reason it is a winner, it can be used everywhere and when you do you are in good company. Stephen Fry uses Audioboo as does the BBC.
It is not necessary to set up an account with Audioboo to record your students’ voices. However if you do all of your “boos,” as they are known, will be collated into one place and on the Audioboo site you can create your own channel. If you use the same account on your iOS devices the students can simply record and upload in a matter of two or three clicks, the technology and the app become transparent, which is what makes for excellent blended elearning in a class. I was using Audioboo in a class last week and the students were working on a range of devices with ease.
With Audioboo you can use it in the classroom in so many ways that they are almost too numerous to mention. However I have used it as a running reading record for students and also as a resource for students to listen to their own reading and to set their own goals. With only three minutes of recording time on the free account available to you, the students have to learn not to waffle or to pause their recordings. It is a great tool to use to capture student thoughts, ideas and concepts and use these recordings to scaffold later work.
In short this app is what good elearning tools should be, greater than the sum of its parts, simple to use, transparent. Oh and its free!
I have had a great month of June. I have worked non stop, even through the weekends. The highlights have been the tutorials site going live. I have also been working with osteopaths in Auckland and with tourism operators in North Canterbury working with them to show how social media tools can be used to reach out and inform their target audiences. The schedule has been punishing, but the outcomes and rewards have been more than worth it. Finally, today I have learned that I have been accepted to present at the ITOC conference in August. Hopefully this will open up a whole new avenue of opportunity for me in the coming weeks and months.
I have been working in this school since the middle of last year and in that time some tremendous changes have started to happen. E-learning is starting to put down some strong roots and is well on the way to being an integral part of a significant number of the classrooms there. There is still plenty of work to do, but the images above demonstrate one of the techniques that I use to foster a climate of independence in students so that they can achieve their learning goals. To manage the different rate at which students master different tools at their disposal, I encourage the development of a class experts system.
In this particular year 2 classroom the teacher has adopted this idea and made a wall display where students can pin their own images against a range of skills that they have mastered, it is in effect a community bulletin board of the type that you see in a supermarket. Look at the range of skills these students have mastered in the images above. It is a visual guide for other students who need additional support, they know who to go to, other than the teacher, to seek help. It is an e-learning equivalent of the”See three before me” classroom management strategy. The bulletin board process creates a conveyor belt of skills acquisition, so what happens when everyone in class can do the same skill? The students take a photo of themselves with ‘thumbs up’ and pin that photo by the now redundant support service on the bulletin board, this particular solution was devised by the students in this class themselves.
Running in tandem with this in class initiative, other students within the school have created their own ‘Yellow Pages” adverts and have put them into a binder. These adverts again advertise which e-learning skills an individual student is willing to offer support for. The key difference here is that this binder is displayed prominently in the staffroom. These adverts are aimed directly at the staff and staff are seeking help from their students. The benefits of this role reversal can not be underestimated where learners become teachers and teachers become learners.
As I work in schools with a wider and wider range of teachers, my ideas for the layer cake are starting to crystalise. I was working in a school recently and the teacher I was with had an “Aha!” moment. She had made a pedagogical, if not that then a conceptual breakthrough about e-learning and how it might look and be delivered within the space she teaches in. It is her quote that is the title of this post. I am still working on the full variant of the Layer Cake post, but do not want to release it too early, until I have fully ironed out the wrinkles myself. However, in parallel with the Layer Cake e-learning methodology that I am developing I am also developing support materials in the form of templates, resources and rubrics etc to support teachers once I am not working with them. I shall be devoting more time to this entire endeavour in the coming days and weeks, but work is un-relenting at the moment, which is good! It is also clear that there is a desperate need for retro fitting the new paradigm/pedagogy/methodology, call it what you will that is e-learning to good many schools and teachers alike. All new inquiries welcome.
As July approaches and New Zealand can finally get its hands on an iPad, videos like the following allow us to plan just how we might use it. Just think of the classroom applications too!
I have just run my 90 tools in 90 minutes presentation again, with added tools. This is the second time that I have done this presentation. I had a couple of moments of brain freeze where I muddled up tools. It is such a high energy presentation it leaves me exhausted! I actually delivered 94 tools in 84 minutes. The response from the delegates was overwhelmingly positive, the gratifying thing is that 55 people completed their forms and submitted them. I will run it again if there is interest in me doing so. I am currently working on a presentation for Ulearn in Christchurch, but this one is more aimed at school leadership and systems analysis. I am now working on tomorrows far more practical session.
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