Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

My co-worker (Estee Williams) and I just wrapped up our ninth episode of the P.O.D.C.A.T.S podcast (Personal on Demand Curriculum and Technology Show). We started this at the beginning of the school year as a fun and different way to provide tech PD to our teachers. We wanted to see if there was an audience for it as well as learn some new skills that we could use in the classroom.  It has been challenging these past two month as we have had to record from our separate homes, when we had been recording in person. We did like the challenge though and could now use our new skills to interview folks from around the country if needed. Sadly, we've decided to table our Podcast for next year in lieu of some other tech PD ideas we would like to try.  I thought, as we are closing out this experiment, I would highlight what we did and used tech wise in case anyone wanted to give it a try. The first thing we did was develop our name, logo, and...

Posted "I Can" Statements for the Activity Today I worked with a group of two fifth grade classes recording and editing a breaking news radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor. We used Audacity to record and edit. The students had some experience back in December when I worked with them introducing them to the tool. I wrote about my experience in a previous blog post. The December activity was designed to be fun and show them the basic tools they would need in the program to record and add sound effects.  The activity today was designed to show them the structure of a "breaking news story" on the radio in the context of their Social Studies curriculum. Each group will be working on their own scripts within the next two weeks with their final project due March 24.  I worked with the teacher Mrs. Gannon with our sample recording, as a way of walking through what we thought might work with students. We decided to use the Who, What, Why, Where,...

The other day I worked with a 5th grade class teaching them how to use Audacity (free, open source, audio software). They had to recite the shortened poem , "Twas the Night Before Christmas" and add in eight sound effects (that I curated for them). The project was leading up to a larger one after the break where students will be making WW2 era radio broadcasts in their Social Studies class.  Finished student poem project - Tyler's Recording Audacity is available in our district software center for students to download. It looks intimidating to use but there are really only a few things that students needed to learn how to do (I made the cheat sheets above so they could have some reference materials to refer back to). My goals for the students were to teach them how to: - Record an audio track - Delete an audio track - Split and move audio tracks - Trim audio tracks - Import audio tracks - Fade In and Out - Reduce the volume - Know the ...