My Technology Addictions

Five Weeks of Fun

I haven’t written a post for nearly 2 months but have been spending nearly ever day of the past 2 months on my laptop, I have been teaching and developing software. This is a short rundown of my experience with a group of great teenagers that I introduced to the web one day a week over a five week period.
In the last term of school I have had a group of 14, 15 year olds for one day a week over 5 weeks showing them all the wonders of the web. They were a great group of kids from 3 different high schools, they created blogs, added to a class wiki, created iGoogle pages and lastly created podcasts.

I was surprised how little of these technologies they knew or had even heard about. I think the more we use these things like blogs, wiki’s flickr, twitter and facebook ourselves we assume that others, especially the teenagers also know about them. They had a great knowledge of what games they can play online, chat programs and some knew about MySpace and most had an email account and all knew about YouTube, but that was about it. They did not know what Blogs, wiki’s or podcasts were.
The challenge with this group was how to show them how to use these technologies, keep it interesting, relevant and get through the work in the small amount of time we had. They had set tasks to complete each week and this was all detailed for them on a class wiki that I set up, this also contains links to their blogs, del.icio.us accounts and podcasts.

When it came to creating podcasts I had visions of copyright issues spinning around in my head and eventually I thought of using Nursery Rhymes. I decided that the easiest way to get them to create their podcasts was to give them a list of Nursery Rhymes. These are the steps that they followed:

They each picked one Nursery Rhyme and then created a PowerPoint presentation of the Nursery Rhyme.

A new slide was used for each line of the Nursery Rhyme and they had to add appropriate images.

The slides from the Presentation were saved as images, a handy feature of PowerPoint.

Then using Windows Movie Maker they imported the slides, recorded the Rhyme and added transitions and effects.

Once this stage was completed they saved the Movie file.

Then using SUPER © they converted it to a mp4 format.

I created a podomatic site for the class, they uploaded their podcasts and now they can been seen by all.

Most of them created 2 podcasts and really enjoyed it, although some of the recordings don’t sound “too enthusiastic“, as the first thing they said when recording their voices was ” I don’t sound like that!”.

All in all it was a great exercise, exhausting but enjoyable. My adventure into the world of web 2 and more my inspiration and knowledge comes from my friend Sue who introduced and taught me how to use them. She is a wealth of knowledge and shares it with all, thanks Sue

Updated links on using blogs now on What is this?

I started this post to create a set of links for How To’s and interesting articles about Blogs, Wiki’s and all things related. I had a list of links that I have emailed to others when asked and thought I would add to this and that is when the trouble started. The more I looked the more I found. So I just kept adding and adding links. Sometimes I would stop and read articles and even found a comic that certainly rings true with me and I was very restrained and only added one comic. This post was getting very large so I decided to add a What is that? page and have placed all the information there.

So go have a look, any additions welcome.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.

Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.