A week of craziness

After leaving class on thursday night, I came home to discover that I had been broken into. Of course, the one item that I was anxious to play around with - my computer- was among the items taken. Though in some ways it allows me to avoid having my voice on record. I like the idea of podcasts: I like how Meri uses on her commute to work, I like having an audio recording of stories, and interviews to share with my students. However, I do not necessarily want to make my own. I agree with what Kathleen said about someone being able to talk, but once you put a microphone in front of them they freeze up is exactly what happens to me. It's hard enough to record the answering machine message for my phone.

I really hope that as teachers we are not forced to record lessons, homework assignments, etc for our students. Yes, they could be helpful, but I agree with what was said in class - when do we place the responsibility of listening and taking notes during class on the students? True, it's nice for students to go back and rehear the points that they missed, but I also want students to learn how to talk to a teacher face to face. If the face to face interaction was not important, than why don't we have the students stay home and watch a video recording of a lesson? Why do we have schools?

I am still exploring the different educational podcasts sites. I think there are some great resources out there to include as part of the curriculm - I already used the audio recording of "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in class to help the students get the humor behind the language in the story.

Blogging

The Dennis Mahoney "How to Write a Better Weblog" was fascinating. It is actually something that I could see using for my students too. I'm still not sure if a blog should be written in the same language as an essay, a journal, a im, etc. I tend to write in the blog as if it is a journal. But after reading some of the other people's blogs, I can see how it can become more formal. What I like about his article was the descriptive language element. This is what I am constantly trying to get my students to do - show not tell.

I think the cold weather is getting to me

I don't know if I'm just a pessimist but with software like i-lighter, google docs, basecamp, etc all I can think of is the ways that the students can take advantage of it. With i-lighter I would be afraid of plagiarism; with google docs I would be afraid of students tampering with each other's documents; with basecamp I would assume that a student would just log on and leave it on to get the work hours logged in.

I can see all of these programs working with teachers like me - organization freaks who spend a lot of time trying out new things. But the factors that always bog me down are time and appropriate usage.

I really like the idea of pandora though - radio stations that I can program with my favorite music - how can that be wrong?