We made it through Hurricane Ike with little damage other than the eight days of school that we lost. For a school on an accelerated schedule, that much time lost is devastating. We finally went back to work last Wednesday and we have been playing catch up the entire time.
My original plan was to publish the podcasts on the district’s LMS site because they have an RSS feed, but we were having serious problems with LMS and Lightspeed the week before the hurricane, so I was never really able to post an RSS feed and see how the students responded to it. Luckily, any problems we had this past week have been short-lived and are usually solved if we restart Internet Explorer.
The best news is that I have created two podcasts for my students! One was going over the answers on a quiz that they took and the second was a test review! I’m so excited! I really hope it works, because at this point, it really saved me a lot of time in the classroom. This way, I also made sure that each class got the same material.
The problem that I’m facing now is publishing these RSS feeds. We are using LMS right now, but I can’t publish them to iTunesor Podcast Alley because I need a public forum to post on. I’m going to poke around on Edublogs and see what options are available. I am a little concerned about this, because Klein’s system does not seem to be very compatible with Edublogs. No one can get an e-mail from Edublogs! I’ll look into that, because I find this to be a very user-friendly site.
Looking back at previous posts today, I already feel months behind. I had wanted podcasts ready to go for the first day of school. Here it is, almost the end of our grading period, and I’m just starting to identify the kinks rather than solving the kinks.
At least my group of students is excited about the process. Right now, I feel like I’m leading them on because I haven’t really given them much podcasting. I’m working on the curriculum as we speak, but for now, I feel like I’m dragging the process out. The great news is that they all seem to be on board and eager. I think they feel special because they know they are involved in the pilot project for a grant. I won’t say that they are looking froward to TAKS testing reviews, because they aren’t, but when I explained my TAKS plan to them, they were agreeable. The students who still need to take TAKS are going to create specific tutorials for middle school students. Each student will create tutorials for the objective that she/he needs to pass.
I passed out the TAKS study guides yesterday. As I expected, they groaned and all told me to keep the book. I agreed to do so, but had them look at their TAKS objectives and pointed out to them what we’d be podcasting later on. I didn’t hear a single groan – in fact, they were asking me questions. I’mnot going to go so far and say they were excited about TAKS tutorials, but I think they are now looking at it in a new way. It was really what I needed to keep my head afloat after the past few weeks.
