Final Summary

At the beginning of the school year, I began my field study introducing the Writing Room with the focus to inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences (Writing Room, Abbynet e-mail and Podcasting). However, I soon realized that I was taking on way too much as my time line did not consider that my students were not computer literate, couldn't type, and needed additional support with the rules of writing.

After a slow and unmotivating start, I decided to change my focus to Podcasting since my class has had some experience using Garage Band. Before introducing this exciting new technology to my students, I needed to first learn all about it myself. I started small, by posting weekly unit spelling words as a Podcast on my website. Each week the Podcast quality improved as I learned to add music to the presentations. Next, I chose a small group of students to record a Reader's Theatre play to post on my site for students to listen at home. I was beginning to create a Podcasting hype in our school community as students and parents were beginning to ask questions and inquire all about it, and so I created a link from the school site as well as my site to include the entire community. I even had my principal involved by creating a Podcast of 'Welcome' where he spoke about our school and its exciting programs. Since our school is located in a high ESL community, I had our multicultural teacher translate and record my principal's Podcast in Punjabi and had that same Podcast translated again into Korean by our international teaching contact. Since many of our parents couldn't read our site anyway, this was an excellent opportunity to include everyone and break down any language barriers. To listen to this Podcast, Click Here.

As soon as the Podcast link became active, I began receiving many page hits and realized that I will need to keep up with new Podcast episodes. That was the time to bring my entire class into the project. My students, after writing and publishing fractured fairy tales, recorded their stories as Podcasts. I discovered that using the built in voice recorder in First Class 8.3 had some bandwidth issues as the recordings often skipped. Since we used Garage Band already, it was no trouble for my students to use this familiar program to record their Podcasts. Now that I am teaching poetry, I will have my students record their poems and have music added to enhance the mood of their poems.

During my observations, I have found that students were very excited about using this technology. I found Podcasting particularly useful as it covered all 5 strands of elementary Language Arts (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking, and Representing). Based on my individual page hits, people tended to visit the links that had audio and video clips as they were the most popular. Each web page on the Internet today must compete for people's attention.....more like people's attention spans. I have noticed that people, and me being guilty of this myself, have a short attention span with web sites as people don't generally have a lot of time to read through pages and pages of text, like we did back in the 1990s. Therefore, I wanted to keep these popular features as well as important information all on one page where people would not get board and leave. For my data collection, I made many detailed observations and summed them up regularly as journal entries on my blog site. Since my class was small anyway, I did not require an on-line survey, but simply checked in with each student to determine their thoughts and feelings on the projects that we were working on.

Overall, this learning community was a powerful experience for me, and ultimately my students. With the complete phase out of OS9 in the district, all schools will have Podcasting capabilities. It is my hope that other teachers will attempt this exciting and innovative addition to their Language Arts programs!

Podcasting Issues and Solutions

Hello Fellow Community Members. Like many of you have shared, I too have been very encouraged and impressed with the great things occurring in your schools with technology. For my blog update, I do not have a podcast or movie this time but I thought that I would briefly document some podcasting trouble that I have run into and offer a viable solution/alternative to keep podcasting alive in your school. For examples of podcasts that I have been involved with, please visit my class and school site at: http://sd34.homeip.net/shipwell/home/

With using First Class 8.3 Client for recording podcasts, I have encountered a problem with the bandwidth at my school......it is too slow and cannot keep up with the audio recording of my students' voices. The result sounds like a CD skipping, or a bad impression of the 80s character Max Headroom. I quickly realized that there was no way to fix this problem and so I have chosen to have my students use Garage Band to record their podcasts. The podcast option on this program have built in music and vocal tracks ready to go. Students record their voices on already set vocal tracks. Once recorded, students export their file to iTunes, convert it to an mp3 and then drop that file into their Home Page folders on Abbynet. From there they can access their podcast on the Internet. The only downfall, is that I have not figured out how to make the tunes have an RSS feed so that people can subscribe and download to their computers. At this stage, downloading is not a big deal as my kids are pretty excited that their voices are live on the Internet. Currently, I am recording Fractured Fairy Tales and hope to get to poetry by the end of the month.

January 2007 Update

January 2007 Update:

Over the course of the Learning Community, I have been focusing my learning on the Writing Room to better student writing. However, after that great technology conference on January 19th, I was compelled to take a closer look at my main objective for my field study and try to re-evaluate its relevance in my classroom. Throughout my study, I have found that this writing medium has slowed my students' writing and creative output as their typing capabilities are simply not up to par. And so, I have been stuck in neutral for a couple of months, that is until the tech conference jump started my focus for my field study.

As Gary's Podcasting information began coming down the pike, I have been growing more and more interested in its capabilities to instill student motivation in writing. During the conference, it was refreshing for me to hear Sharon Jeroski's comments on making your field study meaningful so that you enjoy what it is that you are doing, and not growing to hate it. I think that was the final nudge for me to sit down and really make this project 'real' for me. While looking at my initial goal of improving student writing in the Writing Room, I asked myself, what is it that I hope to achieve out of all of this? This goal was unrealistic as it was not authentically representing my class. For starters, my expectations were too high. The initial goal implied that my students' would become better writers by using the Writing Room, but not taking into fact that other writing and technical structures had to be in place first. As a result, my students were taking longer to produce written and typed work as time began encroaching on my other subject units and lessons. Secondly, after all of that work, we did not have any feedback responses from other students in the Writing Room and so my students gradually stopped checking the conference folder.

Soon after this thought process, I wrote down my initial goal and was surprised at how fast my changes began to take shape. I first wrote: "My focus is to improve student writing by using the Writing Room." Hmmm. OK. In order for my students, and ultimately myself, to be fired up about a subject, we need to be first of all motivated. Therefore, my job would require motivating and inspiring my students to spend more time and attention on their writing. Well isn't that what teachers already do? Furthermore, what is it that would motivate my students to work hard and be passionate about what it is that they are doing in the Writing Room? The answer was clear, so I have observed. I noticed that students like an Audience. Some like quiet recognition, while others crave the Lime light. Students enjoy feedback, especially from other people in addition to their teacher. I have noticed these key motivators inspire students to persevere through rough drafts to a good reflection of their best work. So by changing the first word "improve" to "inspire," I immediately came up with this: "My focus is to inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences for feedback on their work coupled with the use of additional mediums of technology (Abbynet e-mail penpal & Podcasting)."

With Podcasting becoming the latest rage, I thought that I would get on board with this exciting 'current' technology. At first, I set up a short podcast on my classroom website of a student dictating the weekly spelling words for students to listen and practice at home. I will be taking this up a notch by working closely with my principal to set up a Podcasting link on our school web site welcoming visitors to our school community, providing important information and the latest school news. This will also be translated into Punjab and Korean to help reach our entire community by breaking the language barrier. In addition, I would like to have my students record their own podcasts of their writing samples (poems, stories, readers theatre) that will be posted on our sites as well. Hopefully, we will be able to provide a link to the podcasts in our Writing Room samples as well to broaden our audience.

In closing, I will be including Podcasting into my field study and observing its effects on my students' language output. By including Podcasting to the mix, not only will I be covering the reading and writing strands in Language Arts, but including the listening and speaking strands as well.

Field Study for the STaRT Learning Community Plan

Field Study for the STaRT Learning Community
By Shane Hipwell
Bakerview Elementary
Grade 5 Teacher

Focus: "To inspire student writing by introducing each child to wider audiences in order to foster feedback on their work coupled with the use of additional mediums of technology (Abbynet e-mail penpal & Podcasting)."

Resources:
• Writing Room:
-Connecting with another class of students and engage in peer responses to student writing samples.
-Responding to other grades' writing (6/7/8)
-Posting original Writing (Poems, stories, readers theatre)
• Podcasting:
-Setting up podcasts on School and Class Website
-Start with posting spelling podcast
-Will have students read and record their writing onto a podcast and post it onto my site, and, if allowed, the Writing Room as well.

Assessment Strategies:
- Blog journals, video clips, podcasts
- Electronic Surveys
- Mentors and Colleagues
- On going reflections using journaling on the blog site

November Update!

Click on the below link to view a streaming Quicktime video of my progress with using First Class 8.3 Client and the Writing Room with my grade 5 students. In summary, I have created a class conference folder for my students to respond on weekly topics in the same fashion as how they would use the Writing Room. We have just begun to use the Writing Room, but hoping to connect with other grade 5 teachers who can reply to.


Click Here to View Video Clip!

I have been looking forward to focusing my technology teaching practices into the curriculum in more relevant detail (Writing & Research). Sure, Garage Band, iMovie and such are always a hit with the students, but they do tend to take a long time to come to fruition. And, at times, I get to the end of that unit and think....."What was the purpose of this unit again?" Sure we have a movie, but its initial intent gets muddled up somewhere along the line. My project will be focusing on the using First Class 8.3 Client with my students. Students will use this software to send e-mails, create web pages, and post and respond to student writing in the Writing Room.

With this writing initiative, I am really excited, as are my grade 5 students, to begin this journey. I have a friend in Japan who is requesting me to 'pen pal' up my students to help develop his students' language. Just recently, two of my students replied to a grade 8 poem in the Writing Room. I am still trying to get them to use spell check. Most of my students have good inspirational quotes in their signatures. I think they will present themselves well to other students with tweaked fonts, colours, quotes, and signatures. Plus, they are responding to these e-mails professionally! We have a class conference folder and I post weekly reflection topics: Here is what I posted last Friday:

Today we are going on a field trip into the community. Describe, in detail, your roles and responsibilities as an ambassador of Bakerview Elementary.

(Be sure to spell check your work)

Some Responses:

• My role as a ambassador is very big.I have to keep my hands to my self,act my age ,stay with the class ( don't wander),no rough play,do not talk while someone else is speaking,I will listen to the adult helpers,I will act responsibly and I pay full attention

• As a ambassador of Bakerview Elementary I have the responsibility of being in the oldest grade and to show how great we are of a school to the other schools, teachers and
people who work at the mall. if I were to be unrespectful, I would not be a ambassador of Bakerview Elementary.

-"Life is a dance floor, use it"- Pink

• I wont be walking on the street or screaming and yelling I'll just walk quietly.When I get inside I'm not going shopping or behaving like a monkey.At that time in the middle of going on a ride or writing we wont shove/push others from different schools!

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."~ Bill Gates

Welcome to my Blog!

I was kidnapped by anti-spam bots embedded in this Blogger software. I have been unable to post anything, as my account needed reviewing from the 'experts.' So, after 4 days of the same, I did what I normally do in the lab when my computer crashes....I turn it off and try again. I just reset my account. Hopefully, I will be able to put this Blog site to good use for commenting and reflecting on my teaching and learning practices with teaching technology in the classroom.