Screencast

Translation of post "Screencast" of March 21st 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Yesterday I discovered Hans Feldmeier's website; Hans surfs the web looking for interesting tools and apps.

I found there some reviews about slideshows and mind mapping tools. Among the things that made me curious is a service offering recording and hosting screencasts directly from the user's computer.

What is a screencast? It's a movie, a recoding of what happens on the recorder's computer screen, maybe even with audio and comments. How can this be useful? For example, screencasts are favoured by software or OS producers to show in a simple but direct and effective way how to install and use the product they want to talk about.

And in the educational field? Besides using it to show the functions of an educational website, for example, I can imagine movies one can take with Cabri or GeoGebra: I can create a geometrical construction, comment on it with a microphone and while doing so I can record it in a screencast that will be embedded in my educational website in order to make reproducing the task easier for the students. Using my screen as a blackboard, a screencast can be used to publish on the net what happens on the screen/blackboard itself.

Together with the podcast service (which, in turn, can be used to publish real lessons as videos), for which a videocam is required, screencast can be a useful technique to present contents in a technological and lively way.

Having a Linux OS, I found a nice package to make screencasts: XVidCap. I hope I'll be able to take a demo screencast to post soon.

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Teaching or...?

Translation of post "Insegnare o...?" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

An interesting lexical question.

Well, first of all I want to make it clear that I deem laughable many of the lexical fashions taxing especially the education world in Italy. A primary school is not different just because it's no longer called elementary, and so on.

But words also express the thought of their user, luckily, when there is one. In RashKath's post in educatorslogin, a blog of Indian teachers, I found a couple times this association: "teaching learning". For example, the author states that she is "exploring new strategies for teaching learning mathematics". Bravo for what she is doing, bravo for "mathematics" plural as in British English or in French and not singular as we Italians or American English speakers say. Bravo especially for this expression: "teaching learning mathematics". She does not teach maths: she teaches how to learn it.

Well, it's clear that if I teach you to learn maths, you learn to learn maths, but in the process you learn maths. Classic two birds with a stone. With the additional value that once I'm not there, if I taught you learning maths, you can still learn maths...

In my opinion this is worth some reflection. Also because learning processes, unlike our cement-cast syllabuses and curricula, change with time...

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366photos

Translation of post "366photos" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

Wandering about the web I happened to find a Flickr group called 366photos.

The idea is (was, it started already) to take a photo a day for a year. I read comments of some participants and others who just look at the thing, that this way of doing, sooner or later, changes your way of seeing and thinking; it somehow pushes you in a world where the shot, and the search for a good one, has a priority position in how you perceive reality. Some bloggers do the same, forcing themselves to write a post a day, to get their minds accustomed to a way of expressing themselves that probably requires, for some people, some "conversion".

I found this idea (a bit less extended) in Darren Kuropatwa's blog; he is a Canadian teacher with lots of good ideas; for example exploiting flickr and its communities in an educational way... Think of how good it would be for a language teacher (I'm thinking of Italian Italian language teachers in first or second high school classes, where one of the learning objectives is analysing languages and forms of expression) or an arts teacher to be able to stimulate students' creativity, show them precious educational uses of their mobile phones or of the net, while s/he teaches them how to read an image taken by the students' themselves, or while s/he asks them to build images according to the content that must be read in them...

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Online and local wikis - technical notes

Translation of post "Wiki online e in locale - note tecniche" of March 19th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I knew hardly anything about wikis. To learn more I tried creating accounts at a couple of web sites offering free wiki spaces (pbwiki and wikispaces) and to install locally on my laptop some wiki servers: tikiwiki, dokuwiki, mediawiki.

I found pbwiki simpler, more customizable and overall more attractive, between the two candidates for a work-wiki (and I already started using it).

About local wikis, the only one that didn't give me trouble instaling on my Ubuntu box was dokuwiki, which I immediately adopted as a (network) home collaboration tool. Too bad it doesn't iron.

One of the good things of these technologies is exactly this: being able to learn by yourself, simply reading here and there and trying hands-on.

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The tools that changed teaching?

Translation of post "Gli strumenti che hanno cambiato l'insegnamento?" of March 18th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

On "Classroom 2.0" a forum was opened about the educational tools that have become irreplaceable according to the participants, because of how much they changed their way of teaching.

Many answered: computers, internet, blogs and wikis, projectors and many others.

I feel a bit of shame: I should answer "the blackboard". Does this mean I need some fresh air? We'll see...

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Wikis and blogs

Translation of post "Wiki e blog" of March 17th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

In this wiki I found interesting ideas worth sharing.

Blog (from web log). An online diary where the writer (or writers) post articles or columns that are reachable, according to the settings, by anybody or by a selected group of users, and where readers (or a portion of them) can post comments taking part in a discussion. This site is a (rather poor, at present) example of a blog.

Wiki (from hawaiian, "quick", "fast"). It is a collection of structured information reachable by a set of people who can modify, edit, add to, the site's contents. Wikipedia is a (gigantic) example of a wiki.

What follows is just some night babbling of mine with no real supporting facts.

What educational uses could I find for these two lead characters of Web 2.0? The former is surely advisable for discussions, creative writing, somehow for any kind of activity where exchange and dialogue are central. Because of the journalistic form and the sequential line of posts, I think a blog could be useful for building individual distinct knowledges through sharing and discussing.

The latter is more useful in situations where there is a final goal to reach through successive approximations and in a collaborative way. Since many wiki services also offer discussion tools (for example about what a user modified), a wiki can be useful for cumulatively increasing a single unifiable collective knowledge, without a central role of chronology.

Focusing on the role of time, I notice a substantial duality of the two media: a wiki is a synchronic glance on a knowledge that is growing diachronically. A blog is a diachronic glance on different knowledges growing synchronically.

Focusing on the central element and the type of knowledge involved, a wiki is object-centered, and the object is singular (meaning that the content of a wiki is only one), whereas a blog is process-centered, and the process is plural (meaning that the knowledge-building processes are as many as the people involved).

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10 ways to use a blog

Translation of post "10 modi per usare un blog" of March 15th 2008 on "Il deserto dei tartari 2.0".

I found on the Edublogs site some suggestions about the educational use of blogs. Here's a paragraph-titles summary.

1. Post materials and resources.
2. Host online discussions.
3. Create a class publication.
4. Replace your newsletter.
5. Get your students blogging.
6. Share your lesson plans.
   
7. Integrate multimedia of all descriptions.
   
8. Organise, organise, organise.
9. Get feedback.
10. Create a fully functional website.

Obviously this is just for advertising Edublogs services. But, as a beginner blogger, I find quite interesting seeing all these possible situations when a blog or a blog-related service is suggested...

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