Low Effort High Impact - A Year 6 Class Publishes Story

Hi everyone. I am working on some big blog posts on:

1. A powerful new phone service I've discovered allowing teachers to record themselves over the phone, and then students ring, listen, and respond. All this can equally be accessed through a website. 

2. Our 3D island and all the weird, wonderful, unexpected, and exciting ways students and teachers have used this environment for learning.

But for now... just a quick word about web publishing. I know I've posted about it before - but this technique just keeps coming back to me and is becoming my basic 'bread and butter' application of technology in the classroom. 

The technique: create a website and feed student output into it for the world to see.

This is the simplest technique in the world. Go to wordpress.com & you'll establish a free website within about 2 to 3 minutes.

From there, publishing student work is a matter of 'copy and paste'. 

It's a low effort, high impact technique. Teachers don't have time for showy tech tricks that take time and effort. If they're going to use technology it will have to be hyper-efficient, requiring only a very small amount of time and effort, but yielding an excellent impact on student learning.

The impact on student learning comes from their awareness of having a global audience. They get a map on their website with red dots showing location of visitors, and they get a counter showing how many visitors have come to their website.

Case in point - Mr Tim Stanwell approached me after hearing about this idea, suggesting his Primary class publish a science fiction story they had written.

I visited their class this morning and showed them how to post material to their website: http://ringoftime.wordpress.com . This took about 20 minutes. 

Since then, just today, they published a prologue and two chapters of their story. I mentioned it on Twitter mid-morning.

By this evening the website has had 170 visitors, and 6 or 7 comments. The kids are amazed. The teacher is amazed. Frankly, I'm amazed. 

Imagine how this has affected these students' thinking about what they write. This isn't practise, it's for real. They have a readership. What they say matters. It reframes the way they perceive their studies. It matters now. They have something to say, a platform to say it on, and an audience to listen, NOW!

This technique adapts to any age group, any subject. It's super easy, takes very little training (15 to 30 minutes), no planning or programming (you just take what students were creating anyway, and publish it), and very little maintenance time (just copy and paste student work into the website and click 'publish').

So, you know, I'll be blogging soon on some pretty spectacular tools, but very high in my mind at the moment is still web publishing. It's low effort, high impact, and perfect for empowering and inspiring students.

Examples from my school:

Year 5/6 Sci Fi story http://ringoftime.wordpress.com

Year 2 http://www.nbcsgreenfingers.com

Year 9/10 Geography http://australianenvironment.wordpress.com

Year 11 French Novel 'The Little Prince' study guide  http://frenchonlinelittleprince.wordpress.com

Year 11 Wordsworth Poetry analysis and reflections - http://wordsworthreflections.wordpress.com 

Setting up a School Internet Radio Station

Well, I am in the best mood ever!

With very little fiddling around, I've set up an internet radio station for my school.

Once set up, you simply upload some MP3 sound files, and people who tune into the radio station hear them broadcast live.

To listen in, go to http://shoutcast.com/directory/search_results.jsp?searchCrit=simple&s=Booralie and click 'Tune In!' (At the time of publishing this post, most the of the content has been made by me. The station is only a few hours old. In a few days we'll have student content, and I'll blog again about it).

In our case, we then nominate our radio station as the media stream to play in our 3D virtual world (which we call 'Booralie Island', using the Second Life program. Our students and teacher use this space in parrallel with the physical space of the classroom. It is early days, but a strong community has sprung up).

 [here a student has a created a huge version of the periodic table]

 Anyway, back to the radio station...

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!
- drama students broadcasting entertaining radio plays
- music students recording their compositions
- students of ANY subject, ANY age recording entertaining educational recordings.
- English students speaking from the perspective of a character in the text they're studying, or giving a book review.
- recorded debates
- health and diet tips from students studying nutrition
- students read their creative writing or poetry
- history students retell historical events in a dramatic mode!
- study tips, pretend advertisements, and so on!

Students create MP3 files with a headset (cheap headsets work fine, by the way) and free 'Audacity' software available here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

HOW TO SET UP AN INTERNET RADIO STATION
The way I did it:

1. Set up an internet server that will run your station for you. Go to http://shoutcast.setnine.com/ and decide how many people you want to be able to listen to the station at the same time, and at what quality. I think you want at least 'Bit Rate: 64 Kbps' but any higher than costs more with little increase in quality. We selected 25 listeners maximum. Click on what you want and then you'll have to pay by PayPal or credit card. I paid on credit card and will claim the money back from school.

THE COST FOR MY OPTIONS - $37.50 US per month (or about 60 Australian Dollars)

2. Once setnine.com has set you up (it took them 3 days for me), you'll be emailed a username and password. You log into the website when you want, and upload your audio files. You can create playlists and set them to play on a loop in a certain order, or you can even 'DJ', using the software WINAMP, to run your station live.

To listen to our radio station, click here and then click on "Tune In!"

It won't be hard to maintain and run the station. I'll get a pool of audio files from various teachers, or even direct from inspired students. I simply upload them to the website, and the radio server does the rest!

Web 2.0 Services Pulling the Rug Out

It has now been three

FrenchFM Worksheets

Here are the worksheets for our FrenchFM channel on YouTube:

Pilot Show - Download FrenchFM Emission Pilote worksheet

Episode 1 Tricolore #1, Unit 1 - Download FrenchFM Episode 1 worksheet

Episode 2 Tricolore #1, Unit 9 - worksheet coming soon

Mass Student Shock Reaction

I announced on Thursday morning at assembly that our school had acquired 3D Virtual property.

When I made this announcement there was a shock-reaction amongst all our students. It was one of those spontaneous crowd response moments. There was a some laughter, but it wasn't mocking laughter, it was disbelief laughter. It was quite an electric moment.

The shocked reaction of the students in itself holds a lot of meaning to me.

Why would students be so shocked that technology they'd almost all be accustomed to, is being used in a school context? Why is it unheard of?

The tools that our young people use to connect socially & to express themselves creatively, ought also to be provided to them in school and harnassed for learning.

I announced that we were wanting to recruit moderators for the virtual world & that we'd let them in early. At the meeting I held at lunch, there was an overwhelming crowd and I had to turn many students away (they came back the next day to an alternative meeting).

On Friday, the day after the announcement, a core group of students had filled in applications to be moderators and had permission slips signed.

So I set them up.

I write this on Sunday evening. What a weekend it has been.

On Friday night there was chaos... students trying every wacky thing they could. Objects strewn everywhere. They immediately discovered all kinds of stuff I didn't know existed. One student wore about 8 parrots on his avatar. Others discovered they could become dinosaurs.

On Saturday I gave some of the students plots of land to build on. By Saturday night one of them had created a shop. By Sunday morning he had stocked it with a virtual version of our school uniform.

By Sunday evening, more buildings, including a paint-ball maze and a parrot shop with a teleporter to a building way up in the sky.

And that's the students, while several of my colleagues have worked on some beautiful facilities near a waterfall, and a 'fortress of physics' up in the sky. (My colleagues are on Twitter - @tim__barrett and @peter_robson).