Student teaching & a bit about Skype

I have had a great first week student teaching and am incredibly eager to continue and become more involved. My relationship with my cooperating teacher is unique (she was a teacher of mine years ago) and so we are moving at a brisker pace toward me taking the lead on teaching and, because we know each other well already, she has been incredibly flexible about me implementing my own ideas (love it!). Once I get some technology projects in place, I will be sure to let you know what's what.

For now, a bit about Skype. For those of you who don't know, Skype is a communication application that easily incorporates phone calls, instant messages, file sharing, audio, and video. It is a free download on the web and is fun and easy to use for cheaply contacting co-workers, friends, and family. Of course, Skype also has some great Web 2.0 uses for the 21st century classroom, some of which you might find useful.

An educator and blogger has compiled a quick and dirty list of Skype's applications across a variety of disciplines here and I encourage you to check it out and see what you can do with this tool in your classroom or advisory. If you're still wary about using it, I suggest you start the way I did and download the program and either convince a friend to do the same or find someone you know who already uses it, and just play around making cheap phone calls and free chats. You'd be surprised how many people you know are already Skyping.

For more information, consult skype.com.

A widget in hand is worth SO MUCH!

I am pretty much a podcast nut. I subscribe to four or five dozen podcasts (everything from the French language to pop culture to media trends to learning to play the guitar to cooking...) and I have recently been cultivating a library of podcast content that will be particularly helpful for me once I start teaching. This lead me to subscribe to "The World in Words" segments of PRI's "The World," a program that I always seemed to catch in the car, so never really perused on iTunes. The other night when I was riding in to pick up my brother from work (I had been without podcasts for a week while my truck was in the shop, so I had a LOT of catching up to do), I listened to a quick half-hour of "The World in Words" and found it to be really enthralling vis-a-vis the French language. There was a discussion about the differences between Canadian French and France French, a great item on French slang as dictated by France's immigrant teen population, and a really cool music segment about Arabic-French rapper Rachid Taha. In wondering how I would best make this content accessible to my future students, I went to The World's website and found a great widget.

A widget is a piece of programming that an everyday user (like you or me) can interact with, once it is downloaded or installed on a computer or website. Widgets are typically small applications that perform fairly specific content-delivering functions and are, from what I've seen, pretty customizable and easy to operate. Anyone who uses Macs is very familiar with widgets, but if you have little weather programs running on your computer or have ever seen an embedded YouTube video, you have experience with these applications.

Anyhow, "The World" had a great widget on its site that I was able to take the code from and apply here so that you could A) see one very easy way to incorporate web content into a blog and; B) encourage the academic use of computers and mp3 players in your students. Below is the widget from "The World in Words" and I encourage you to check out the August 26, 2008 podcast (just click it, it will open a new window and download and play the mp3 file) to see what I mean when I talk about the educational value of podcasts.

Enjoy:

Get this widget!