My Edublogging experience

Well, seeing as if you read the title you already have an idea of what I'm about to talk about, let's just dive in shall we?

My experience was a little weird.

When I went on the hunt for edublogger to respond to, I initially ended up finding a couple of them that really spoke to me as both a tech nerd and an aspiring teacher.  One of them even asked for suggestions about what to do with his new iPhone 6 (apparently this man had been living in some kind of hellish Mad Max type reality in which phones only had access to EDGE speeds.  I have heard whispers of such torture).   This seemed great!  I could proselytize about one of my favorite mobile devices, AND help a colleague puzzle through how to better use the booming number of student mobile devices in the classroom.

But alas, the comments section was closed.

This would turn out to be a familiar theme (which, If I have to be honest simply means these people are smart; have you seen the comments section on stuff like YouTube?  It's the worst.  It is truly why we cannot have nice things, like open comments sections on blogs- but I digress.)

When I finally did find a blog that interested me, and had open comments however, I discovered that it was something of a comforting experience.  The blogging teacher in question was publishing his own insecurities and fears, which I realized were MY insecurities and fears.  Knowing that I was not alone, and that even practicing teachers were puzzling through the problems of how to, (for example) keep the quality consistent in a lesson from one class period to the next (this particular teacher was struggling with the realization that his first hour class always got the rough version of his lessons.) was really eye-opening, and comforting in that misery-loves-company kind of way.  If I had to really nail down what it was that I got out of this part of the blogging assignment, it would have to be that feeling of shared community and struggle.

It's nice not to be alone.

Tech Tools in Use

I have to say, out of all the tools which were presented, the one which I was most intrigued to hear about was Audacity, due in no small part to the fact that podcasting as a medium is something which is near and dear to my heart.  I must say, after having seen Audacity, and had the opportunity to think through the possibilities presented by internet-published audio,  I couldn't be more enthused.

Let me be clear, I don't necessarily think that this is an everyday-use kind of tool.  I feel like it really only needs to come out for "special occasions." As a result, I think the complexity that it brings to the table (ordinarily something which would make me reticent to use it in the classroom) can be offset by its use, long-term, around a single, special activity.  I'm thinking of a summative assessment type thing, where students r-enact famous moments in history through their voices, or produce radio interviews surrounding historical personnages or events (my focus here is history, but I think the possibilities content-wise are pretty broad.  You could even use it as a group presentation medium, where groups are asked to produce an "episode" of a podcast which their fellow classmates can then listen in on, rather than bore people to death (and take up class-time) with your standard stand-at-the-front-of-the-room-shaking-like-a-leaf reports.  Again, ordinarily a tool with a learning curve as steep as this one (i.e. more than about 5 minutes) is ordinarily something I would shy away from using with students, but for longer-term projects I think it would be worth it.

Prior to this presentation, I never really considered audio productions as something which could be brought into the classroom, but now, I am wholly intrigued.