Non-Examples Work Well
October 2, 2008 — Vanessa RileyWell, yesterday, I forced my podcasting students to listen to a short “State of the School” podcast. We listened and we completed an evaluation rubric that I borrowed from Region IV’s podcasting in-service for teachers.
One thing that I learned from teaching writing is this: students love to find fault with other people’s products, and giving them a rubric gives them a chance to exercise this to the fullest. They weren’t overly mean, just creative in some of their responses.
They all decided that we could create a much more professional podcast that the one that we listened to. I think they saw it as a challenge. Hooray! The motivation is there!
A teachable moment today: The Klein ISD wikipedia page was edited with derogatory comments (with an especially stinging comment about Vistas) that was quickly changed back, but not before they were seen. I decided to use this to our advantage and pressed the idea that all of the materials that come out of our school need to be professional and appropriate so that we could shake the negative stereotypes that harangue our school (Wikipedia users are still debating on whether or not we are *actually* a school – The word “Program” throws them off.). This too, they took as a challenge and are eager to dispel any myths about the intelligence level on our campus.
The problem that I am now facing is the filter – nearly every page we try to access for example podcasts is categorized as “audio-visual” and is blocked. Podcasting is a pretty “audio-visual” field, so we are trying to figure out a way to allow access to appropriate sites. Copyright-free music and other sound files that we want to use are blocked, and it’s a pain to save on my home computer and transfer the files over to my school computer. It’s very hard to get the students to listen to podcasts that they aren’t interested in, and I can see why. It’s hard work.
