I was reading this brave post by Lisa Thumann “I just don’t like technology” about how to deal with a comment from a professional development participant that really threw off her whole presentation. Great title, about a teacher expressing her fears, her needs about technology. It was not about Lisa, or her activities for the day, although the fallout impacted everyone in the session. Anyone who has delivered professional development to teachers has at some time or another run into a few with this set-in-stone attitude.
After reading the comments, it stayed in my mind, wondering what I would do in that situation, what would the answer be?

Sunday rolls around and another post by Buffy J Hamilton on the unquiet librarian about digital literacy and reading e-books.
Short Stories + iPods= Happy Readers « The Unquiet Librarian
Buffy has a great photo showing one student reading a book and another reading on her ipod. Both can co-exist-of course..and then
in the last paragraph short and succinct, but so true.

“The kids know this—what part of this don’t the adults get? At the end of the day, our focus needs to be about meeting their needs, not ours.”

That was the answer that I was looking for, for the teacher that “just doesn’t like technology”. It’s not about you teacher….it’s about meeting the needs of your students.

It was quite the librarian weekend this weekend for me (and 80 others online). I spent time in the classroom 2.0 session with joyce valenza and buffy j hamilton learning about copyright and creative commons in the library. Archive here.

THEN the final piece of the puzzle was delivered. Joyce Valenza also wrote in School Library Journal about how to retool yourself, a roadmap for teachers to start to learn more, take control of their own professional development and start to remove their own blocks that prevent them from meeting the needs of their students. As teachers become more in control of their own learning, their resistance will drop away as they meet their own needs more easily and can tune it to the needs of their students. The learning network that I am immersed in is made up of most of the aspects mentioned in this article and will form part of a graduate course I am teaching on developing a personal learning network for professional and classroom use next February.

Ta da! PLN works for me, really. On it’s own.

(PLN=personal learning network)

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So many apps so little time.

The potential for the ipod touch in the classroom and in the hands of so many students is exciting. In a classroom recently a teacher asked how many students owned an ipod touch, at least half of the hands went up. How many of them use it for school work? Less hands.

While educators eyes light up at the potential, students see them as mostly music and games.  The connection to learning has to be made for them, unless of course the learning is in the form of a game. (Future post on educational apps) 

To start to find out more about the ipod touch in the classroom I keep going back to the  following resources that have useful examples and ideas.

From the Apple Learning Exchange .
The iPod touch Touching student lives in the classroom.
http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=16472

Tony Vincent (twitterid)
http://learninginhand.com/ipod/touch.html

Chris Webb (twitterid)
ipods in the classroom

Jane Hart
http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/iTouchLearning/topapps.html

My delicious ipod links

Photo: ipod touch screenshot of animoto movie
Related Post: ipod touch as a voice recorder

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The main problem with this mic, is that it is so small it might be easy to lose.

This is a slide share on how it works, with ideas for classroom activities.

Ideas for classroom activities, seen in the above slideshare include

•         Pass around the class and record class/individual goals or student reflections

•         Record students reading their writing

•         Record a fictional interview with a person or object of study

•         Record a test or quiz study Q & A

•         Record key concepts

•         Create a voicethread/Add to a voicethread

•         Record a passage from a book

•         A poem

•         Script/record a radio advertisement

•         REcord Book Talks

•         Literature Circles/book group discussions and share with other groups

•         Adapt/write/record a script

•         Meet the author library development

•         Science Logs, capture real time observations/field notes/sounds

•         Art critiques

•         Write/record historically correct audio diaries

•         Create Walking Guides

•         Gather oral histories

Ref: http://fcit.usf.edu/podcasts/index.html

I

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1. Dropio and voice messages in the classroom