Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: Podcasts

Shifting Our Schools- Second Season Review

sos

Jeff and I concluded our second year of podcasting about shifting schools to the School/Learning 2.0 model. We would like to thank all of our guests who shared their insights and practical ideas to help students, teachers, administrators and parents work together in the shifting process.

You can listen to shows directly from the SOS Podcast page or subscribe through iTunes.

Here are the Essential Questions we discussed this past year:

How to shift when the administrators are not on board?
What prevents administrators from shifting?
What are some shifted practices in our schools?
How to recruit shifted teachers?
Once shifted, where do we go next?
How to make the shift systemic and sustainable in our schools?
Which comes first, shifted practices or 1:1 laptop program?
How to move students from being dependent to independent learners?
How are we preparing pre-service teachers to be shifted educators?
How to measure how shifted your school is?
How to do a school tech makeover on the cheap?
How can we help teachers take more risks in their teaching and learning?

Visual & Audio Immersion

Do you want to “hook” your students into your topic of study? How about immersing them in the images and discussions of your subject? While we use bulletin boards for images to display information about our units of study, how about also displaying information digitally? You can create a slide show to run continuously on your classroom television, projector & screen, and classroom computers to surround your students with images from the unit you are studying. An example would be to show people, architecture, art, food, social scenes, etc., for a social studies unit. As inquiry-driven educators, we want to put those hooks out there to lead our students to pursue answers to their questions.

With so many recordings of famous speeches and podcasts on many topics, it also works to download the files when possible or set the home page in your classroom browsers to have direct links to podcasts that tie into the subject matter. If you are a 1:1 laptop school, look to create a Web page with podcast links, images, and research links for your students to add as a tab to their browser home pages.

An excellent source for images and screensaver software is Webshots. Download their slide show presenter and add images from their vast photo database to construct a show that fits your curriculum needs. Remember to check out their community pages, where Webshot members share their best shots for you to download. Also, consider challenging students to find more images or draw their own (think literature lessons where students draw pictures of characters and scenes) to be added to the collection.

Cheers to Mike Lambert for starting this practice many years ago in my son’s classroom. 🙂

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