Listening Podcast

For this project, fourth grade students had the opportunity to reflect on the importance of being a good listener.  The teacher provided "sentence starters" like "Listening means...." and "When someone listens to me..." to guide them.   The teacher helped the students think about their responses and write them down.  Then the students practiced reading them aloud.  Finally, she recorded them reading their responses.  (She  used a Tascam handheld digital recorder with built-in microphone, but an external mic. would have been better for the quality of the recording).  The audio files were edited in GarageBand.  Then, the kids created some art.  The teacher photographed the art with her iPhone, and then created the enhanced podcast on iMovie.  She used music on freemusicarchive.org.  The kids were very excited to see the final result.

Please share any ideas you have about podcasts/digital storytelling!

On Friday, May 17th, the New York Technology Educators Network (NYTEN) held a meeting at Ardsley Middle School to discuss technology as well as leadership options for the 2013-14 school year. Video from the session can be found above. While much of the meeting was very serious in nature, as you can see below, there was still some time for fun and games! It's Jeremy Luft trying to channel his inner-Eric Sheninger.

Today, we were fortunate enough to attend the final event of the Lower Hudson Regional Information Center's Technology Leadership Institute (TLI) for the 2012-13 school year. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the TLI, it is a phenomenal program run through the LHRIC for our region where local district leaders can hear from some of the biggest names in educational technology. Just in the past few years, some of the speakers who have presented at TLI events include Vicki Davis, Chris Lehmann, Lisa Nielsen, Gary Stager, Yong Zhao, Richard Byrne and David Jakes among others.

But this year's TLI ended with a special treat for the attendees. Perhaps no educator's voice has been louder with regards to the use of mobile devices and social media in schools than Eric Sheninger, Principal of New Milford High School in New Jersey and winner of the 2012 NASSP Digital Principal Award. Eric and the TLI leadership team were kind enough to allow us to record his presentation "Harnessing the Power of Social Media" to share with all of you.

Eric hit on a number of points that schools today must consider. He discussed how learners themselves have changed and how we need to create schools that address these new types of learners. He also highlighted social media and BYOD policies as huge game changers for how he was able to help New Milford grow into one of the leading, most innovative high schools in the country. To see the full set of our notes on Eric's presentation, you can check them out here.

The video above is just a sample of the excellent opportunities that the TLI provides to educators in our region. We would strongly recommend that all districts who aren't already participating in the program reach out to John Hall  to find out how your organization can become part of this program. We'd all agree that it is one of the best professional development opportunities we are exposed to each year and provides an excellent "bang for your buck."

To see Scholastic Administr@tor Magazine's profile of Eric, click the picture below:

NY TECH ED was extremely fortunate to be able to get some time with two experts in educational Google Apps scripting, Bjorn Behrendt and Andrew Stillman. They are the minds behind some of the most commonly used scripts in schools using GAFE including Doctopus, Goobric, and gClassFolders. The conversation covered how they got into Google Apps scripting, different ways to get started on your own, as well as overviews of some of the more useful Google Apps scripts.

To learn more about Andrew and Bjorn and some of their exciting, innovative work, you can check out Bjorn's Edlisten site as well as Andrew's YouPD site.

The broadcast cut off the first two minutes of the hangout so the only thing missing is our glowing introduction of our two guests. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know below. Enjoy!

During this hangout, Jesse Lubinsky discussed strategies that educators can implement in order to effectively use Twitter. During the discussion, Twitter chats and hashtags were highlighted as important concepts that can be used to build followings. We also looked at TweetDeck and TweetChat as tools that can be used to maximize the ease with which Twitter can be used.

Many of the resources discussed, as well as Jesse's full set of Twitter presentation materials from the LHRIC Tech Expo can be found here.

If you have any questions after watching the hangout (or just general Twitter questions), please ask in the comment section below.