This has to be the loftiest title for a post I’ve ever given.  A week ago I received the following message in my in-box:

Hi Nathan,

I’m Victor and I love your blog Portable PD! I write for Udemy, which is a new educational platform that allows anyone to create their own online course. We have 600 courses on our site and are continuing to grow that catalog.

Our readers would love to learn more about you and your insights on the interaction between education and technology. Could I interview you and feature you on our company blog? We could conduct a short, 5-question interview over e-mail. Look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Victor Yu

Always one to embrace opportunities that bring more attention to the Portable PD site, I visited the Udemy site to  see what they were all about.  They appear to be a start up company focusing on online instruction.  I’m not convinced we (meaning Jane and me) are that good of a fit for what they have in mind but, being summer and all, I wrote back saying I’d be happy to participate.  Victor promptly sent me the five questions.  And here is how I answered them:

1. What inspired you to start PortablePD.ca?

PortablePD.ca is a site that supports elementary teachers in using technology with their students.  It was launched almost three years ago when my teaching colleague Jane Smith and I were awarded a $10 000 grant from the Ontario Ministry of Education. This money, and further funds from our school board, was used to assist 12 teachers from our school board in developing their own blogs and podcasts. We met four times over the school year and PortablePD.ca was set up as a place for the participants to find and share resources, tips, questions and advice in between these sessions.

Early on it became apparent that the site was getting traffic and comments from teachers around the world. I take pride in the fact that a couple of my tutorials on the finer points of making a blog with the Edublogs.org platform continue to be referenced by Edublogs’ own support team.

Prior to this project Jane and I worked as team teachers. We discovered we had similar approaches to teaching and working with students as we planned similar lessons for our junior grade classrooms. We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to collaborate on two books for Scholastic: Our Class Podcast and Web Tools for Kids. Both books are part of Scholastic’s Moving Up With Literacy Place guided reading series.

This past fall we were selected to represent Microsoft Canada at the Microsoft Innovative Teachers’ Forum held in Salvador, Brazil. It was an honour and privilege to meet the hundreds of teachers from around the world who participated in this event.

2. What makes the current generation of students different from others in terms of technology?

I’ve worked mainly with the nine to eleven year old set. For the most part, technology for them is viewed as a form of instant entertainment, whether it be in the form of a cell phone, ipod, DSi, laptop, Wii, computer, etc. Take a group of kids on any length of bus ride and you’ll see many of these gadgets appear the moment they sit down- even if the trip is only twenty minutes. It seems these students fear boredom and depend on this constant source of entertainment. (Now, one would thing that would result in a monastery silent bus ride – far from it!) The trick is to find a way to harness that innate quality of play the kids have with technology and apply it to the curriculum.

One of the ways I think I’ve harnessed this is through our class podcast.  PortableRadio.ca is an online radio show that the students produce.  Episodes are generally 10 – 15 minutes in length and the content is created by the students.  We also produce Portable Radio Point of View segments where we take a position on a current news story and send it to our local radio station.  We have been fortunate to have our segments aired quite frequently.  This past year we entered a contest that required we make a video promoting why we like to have “.ca” at the end of our address.  We did very well in the contest (we were second runner up out of close to a hundred entries) and learned a great deal about viral marketing in the process. Again, the students were well aware of popular YouTube videos as a source of entertainment, but they hadn’t put much thought into how and why some of those videos become popular.

In my twelve years of teaching, what makes the “current generation” different from a few years earlier lies more with their parents. In recent years parents seem more confident and capable at participating in our class blog  MrToft.ca. Five years ago, when I first started, it was very difficult to find any parent willing to write to their child through the blog. Granted, I’ve worked out a number of ways to entice parents and students to make use of the blog.

3. How can technology change education?

Technology has opened up forms of collaboration that allow students to take their learning far beyond the walls of the classroom. They have the tools to continue working with each other at home, while away on vacation. They can collaborate with students from other classes, schools, cities, countries.

One example of collaboration that I hope is changing education (it has for me, anyway) is happening on our PortableRecorder.ca site.  The site is a course of study for kids and teachers to learn how to play the recorder.  The site can be used to go much deeper.  Students can use karaoke-style files on the site and mix themselves playing the melody have it included on the site.  This coming year, my hope is to link students up with Jane Smith’s class (MrsSmith.ca) and have them work on composing and performing songs for each other using technologies like Skype, Adobe Connect, and Audacity.  Our classroom blogs also serve as a tool to reflect and critique each others work before being shared on the PortableRecorder.ca site.  We find this type of collaboration quite exciting with the knowledge that our schools are over 60 kilometers apart.  Our hope is to transfer this collaboration to classes in other cities and countries.

Using technology such as a classroom blog, and using it effectively, has allowed me to communicate far more clearly on a daily basis with my students’ parents. This has resulted in parents having a better understanding of what is going on in the classroom and gives them some ideas on how to support their kids at home.

4. What is the biggest obstacle in integrating technology in education?

Teachers need to have time to get their head around how to use the technology. They need to live with it, full time, in their classroom and work out how to best it can fit it with their teaching. It is too easy to be “wowed” by the glamour of the equipment and to lose sight of the fact that it is still best used as a tool for students to gain a deep understanding of whatever it is being taught.

5. As a teacher, do you think it is possible to one day have all-online classroom in the future?

Like everything in education, I think we should focus on the best teaching practices. There are many things that teachers have done in the past that we should continue to do.  However, there will always be a need for innovation and change. There are many types of learners and just as many ways to reach them. The more tools we use to educate our children, the more likely we, and they, are to find ways to help them find success.

???

These were pretty big questions to ask an elementary school teacher only a couple of weeks into his summer vacation, don’t you think?  How’d I do – too much/too little educational jargon?  They were suspiciously like interview questions you’d get sitting across the table from a keen principal, don’t you think (not that I think Udemy is trying to headhunt me or anything).  It will be interesting to see if my comments do end up on the Udemy company blog, and if so, how my thoughts are represented. I know my answers to a few of these questions change almost on a daily basis, but that this is how I view things for now.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled summer of relaxation and decompression.

I created this tutorial to help students and teachers record themselves playing along to the backing tracks found on our Portable Recorder site.

Click here for a full screen version.

Chances are very good that you have students who regularly visit free game websites containing hundreds if not thousands of Flash based games.  Many of these games are pretty good and could be integrated into whatever you happen to be teaching.  Then again, others are completely inappropriate for a school setting.  And then there’s the advertising that surrounds these games.

So what if you found a game that you want to share with your students but not tempt them with other games and ads?  This tutorial explains how to “unembed” or strip away the ads so that all you are left with is the one game you want them to play. As an added bonus, this technique might aid in getting around board filters as well.

NOTE: After clicking play, select the TV icon in the bottom right icon to make the tutorial appear full screen.

In this episode you will hear the Public Service Announcements Mr. Toft’s Grade 5 students created to remind kids to keep their bones healthy.  They first listened to a variety of real public service announcements you hear on the radio.  Next they formed groups and created a script copying the style of one of the commercials they heard. They did their best to make sure an important message about healthy bones was included.  Finally they recorded, edited and mixed music and sound effects into their radio commercials.

Music used in this episode

WW – Greenroom (Music Alley)

Listen

A couple of weeks ago Sue Waters wrote a  post for The Edublogger about the need to reduce file size of photographs before uploading them to your blog.  I left a comment saying this was a pretty important thing for someone new to blogging to get their head around, maybe even in the top ten, if such a thing existed. That prompted Sue to write a new post,  The 10 Most Important Things To Figure Out About Blogging. And that, in turn, prompted me to make my own top ten list.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

1. Look at other class blogs. Teachers have figured out how to make things work for them and their students. Learn what you like and what you don’t like. Sue Waters created a list of blogs to check out.

Get Your Head Around the Lingo

2. “Posts”: Posts are arranged chronologically like a diary or journal.  Better blogs have new content added on almost a daily basis. The posts in my class blog, MrToft.ca, are written by my students and me. I tell my ten year old students to think of posts as a conversation starter at the dinner table. You’re hoping someone will continue the conversation by leaving a comment.

Posts become the primary content of your blog.  It’s what keeps your visitors coming back.  I do my best to have something posted on a daily basis.  Often times it’s what the students were to write in their agendas that day, perhaps with a little more information and links to websites we are using in the class at the moment. While MrToft.ca gets visitors from all around the world, the most important audience is the students in my class and their parents.

4. “Comments”:  I have to admit, it took me a long time to get up the nerve to leave a comment on a blog. I was concerned I didn’t have much to add to the conversation and was content to let others run the conversation.  Take a breath and conquer that fear! The worst thing that will happen is nobody will write to you.  Not a big deal!

Make sure your comment is connected to the post it is attached to. Show that you’ve read and considered the post, and any comments left by other readers, before responding. The comments are often far more interesting than the original post.

5. “Comment Moderation”: Class blogging wouldn’t be possible in my school environment without this. Make sure you have “comment moderation” set on your blog. That means all comments sent to your blog with be filtered through you before publishing. While rare, there have been a handful of occasions over the last couple of years where I was relieved to have the power to delete inappropriate comments and spam.

6. “Pages”: Your blog usually creates links to whatever pages you set up.  You might set up pages that have information that doesn’t change all that often but visitors are likely to search for.  One example is a “Welcome“  or “About Us” page. Sue Waters wrote a post about what to include in pages like this.

7. “Linking”: The internet is all about links. This post is riddled with them! Provide links to websites used in class that day, credit your sources, connect to other classroom blogs. Lauren has this to say about linking in blogs.

Just Keep in Mind…

8. Photos, videos and audio take up a lot of space unless you reduce the size. Sue Waters wrote a post about reducing the file size of images.  Audio and video files can also be reduced.  Google and YouTube searches will produce many tutorials on how to accomplish that.

9. Respect copyright. As teachers, I firmly believe we need to model reponsible use of creative and intellectual property.  Use only pictures, video and audio that the owner has granted permission for you to use.  Use a Creative Commons Search for copyright free media.

Small is Mighty

10. Like Mrs. Anzalone and Kathleen McGeady say, start small.  Don’t worry about mistakes! While millions of people could, I suppose, visit your blog, they won’t. Not at the beginning anyway. Create one blog and write posts on it.  Get students to leave comments on what you write.

What do you think?  Anything you are still trying to get your head around?  Is there something you wished you knew before starting a blog? Please leave a comment.

In our latest podcast:

• Mrs. Smith’s students teach us about brain food


• an interview with members of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority


• poems by students in Mr. Toft’s class


• Sydney’s report about her trip to Egypt


• voicemail from Mrs. Smith’s students


• Caitlin’s report about Zhu Zhu pets

Music used in this episode

WW – Greenroom (Music Alley)

Portable Radio’s First Piano Song – Justin Toft (age 7)

Various musical bumpers created by Nathan Toft and Mrs. Smith using Sony’s Acid XPress

Listen

Here’s another version of our TEDx presentation from April 9, 2010. Vimeo videos don’t seem to be blocked on Ottawa Carleton District School Board computers, and, as a bonus, you can watch it in HD:

Thanks to Maxim and Katherine’s parents for making this video available.  Hopefully, this video will play on school computers as well.

This is the video that we sent to represent us at the TedxOntarioEd conference on April 9th. It was a terrific event. Such an honour to be on the same bill with such a dynamic mix of people.  For more information visit: http://tedxontarioed.ca

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After seeing pictures (via Twitter) of people watching Tedx Ontario from various places around Canada, we decided to send a picture of where we were: Jane’s living room, Stittsville, Ontario, Canada.  Jane probably wants to point out that this picture was taken with a Mac.

We have to say it was one of the most comfortable and supportive locations we have ever presented in.  Watching a prerecorded video of ourselves talking sure took the pressure off!  Our utmost respect goes to all of the other presenters who had more courage than we did and gave their talks live!

Thanks to all of the organizers for creating a such a motivating and memorable evening.