Talking to the world

I am just listening to students talk person to person with someone in Antarctica - this was set up for the classes by my Australian friend Chris.  He has also shared his teacher podcast workshop here and I am about to work through that as I have still not published an actual podcast and that is one of my major goals for 11ESP students to do next year. Chris has also recommended the mac tool Audio Hijack which I will be adding as the clarity of this recording is very impressive, as are Chris's hosting skills!

Circle of the wise

Just reread Vicki Davis' Cool cat teacher blog post about 'Circle of the wise' and am thinking in some ways this is a good way to approach teaching in a classroom environment. Several things that have occurred or evolved this week within the range of students I am involved with are worth discussing here. Firstly I have very limited access to ICT so am trying to be increasingly inventive in ways of using mobile devices. Losing my cellphone early in the week and having to then find a reasonably priced replacement was another challenge - not having the means or inclination to spend a small fortune on 3G iphone was also part of the consideration so in the end I stuck with Nokia as I have had no problems with reliability or of Vodafone's service. So I got this (see left) and am about to embark on learning the foibles of the phone, my students have enjoyed taking pics of themselves and putting themselves and their friends as wallpaper for that class time so now it's my turn! The small phone is the one my friend Toni Twiss is using as her test phones for her efellows research.  Thanks to Toni reading this blog yesterday I now have the correct photo, and a whole lot more info about the good things my phone can do - panorama photos ROCK!
Some other noteworthy events this week were:
1. A group of students completed a submission for the FairGo Ad Awards - focus was to create their own political party. 30 seconds is not long in which to get your message across and creating a 30 second advertisement can be more demanding than creating a 30 minute media product so I was very impressed with their approach and their tenacity in completing and submitting this product on time!
2. Another group of students were not engaging with the novel - S.E. Hinton's 'The Outsiders' so they have been assigned the task of creating audio recordings for the rest of the class to listen to. Ah ha, they are now READING the novel in a group. Challenge here was that we had nothing we could record digitally on to so a voice recorder has been ordered and thanks to PB Tech should arrive at school this week. If it is successful we intend to purchase a few more. Meanwhile, the cassette tape they have recorded on to date seems positively clunky!
3. The third thing I want to reflect on from this week at school is the enthusiasm of senior students to be involved in activities that engage with the real word but that can still gain recognition in terms of the dreaded 'credit system.' Two opportunities for this have been our possible involvement with Seeka in Te Puke, where the students will meet to plan and produce a Health and Safety Induction video - and a student who will liaise with our Principal's secretary to produce material for the school magazine.

Was great to finish the week on such a high with these students who now see their opportunities for the rest of this semester as being a lot more exciting, and all helps to enthuse others - our circle of the wise widens.