Technical blowout – postmortem

When listening to the “Medieval Crime & Punishment” podcast, most of the kids couldn’t hear a thing! This was not helped by the noise of their classmates (no, I do not run a perfectly ordered class). Perhaps if I had enough mp3 players so they could all listen at once this problem would be solved.

I think the main cause was that when creating the podcast, I used my super-dooper USB headset, which gives great sound, but does not imitate the $2 earphones the students were using, often sharing them with a classmate.

The positive out of all of this was that the students were really keen to get onto the mp3 players, and so worked really hard on all the other work.

Student reflections on iHistory – video

This video is a collection of students’ thoughts about the iHistory project. The students really put a lot of energy into their responses, displaying an enviable grasp of pedagogical concepts and methods such as “going to Maccas” and “getting a day off school”.

Slaughteryard post-mortem

Edward Bright’s Slaughteryard

Today I road-tested the iHistory concept. In a couple of weeks we will take students out to visit 5 different sites over one day. Today was intended to show up what worked and what didn’t.

It was a lovely day for a fieldtrip, although one of my students reckons that “fieldtrip” is an ugly Americanism. Four groups went out, armed with iRivers, a podcast on the slaughteryard building that lies in our school yard and a list of tasks that were required, plus a working pen and pencil. I went armed with a camera to record this momentous occasion.

David & Clay listening intently!

Overall, a great success! The students were engaged, said it was ‘fun’ (imagine that…Australian History fun!) and were really keen to know when the fieldwork day was on. There were a couple of issues:

1. Time was an issue. It took them a lot longer than I expected. I thought it would be all over in 30 minutes. But it actually went for about an hour….could have been the pleasure of being outside in the sun that induced them to drag it out! However, given that we have 5 sites to travel around in a fortnight, I need to be careful about the amount of tasks that I require them to do.

2. Teamwork was an issue. It wasn’t so much that some people did all the work while others listened to radio on their mp3s and lazed in the sun (alright…it may have happened!) but more that groups did not split up tasks. They preferred to do everything together. I think this was because they were not confident with the nature of the task.

3. Understanding the tasks was sometimes an issue. In one task, they were required to record their observations using the voice function on the iRiver. However, they all simply wrote their observations very briefly. I wanted a more extended description. Perhaps I need to model that to them.

This experiment also highlighted the simplicity of using on-site and local sites for historical fieldwork.

The circular trunk foundations of the slaughteryard annex

Personal highlight - discovering the old foundations of an annex to the slaughteryard building. They are tree trunks about 20cm in diameter that have been cut to ground level, and are almost covered with grass.

An excellent trial!

Chinese podcast post-mortem

I reckon this podcast was too long! My podcasts have been getting longer and longer. This one was 10 minutes…I reckon I might be getting to like the sound of my own voice too much. The students were getting restless after about 4 minutes, and then probably weren’t listening after 8 minutes.

So is the problem:

• student concentration span?
• the length of the podcast?
• the way the podcast is structured?

Regarding the concentration problem, it’s no use ranting and raving about it – it’s beyond my reach. The length is a problem: most songs (what students are mostly listening to) only last for 3-4 minutes. There may be correlation between their habitual use of mp3 players and their tolerance for the time of the podcast. If I created a TV show, their time tolerance would probably be higher.

I think the main problem is the structure of time. On other podcasts of longer length, I’ve noticed in the introductory spiel, they usually outline the main topics. The topics are often not related! So their could be segment on a historical topic, a segment on some new techno toy they’ve bought, and one on why their baseball team rocks…Is this viable for a podcast meant for educational purposes?

Gold podcast – how did it go? + Process issues

As I said in the last post, I need to check how students are picking up information from the podcasts. For the introduction to the podcast, I wrote about 5 questions up on the board, so that they had something to listen for. Good news! most of them were able to easily pick up the information.

I also asked them about:
- having the same intro music and spiel; thought it was good for recognisability
- having me do all the voice; didn’t want to record with their voices!
- listening to podcast and doing other stuff; no problem for most.