Horatiu Pop a Physics teacher from The British School in Warsaw has produced a series of video podcasts to help his students and other High School students called IB Physics Help.
It is great to see IB teachers using new Web 2.0 tools as part of their teaching, as it enhances the learning of pupils who are used to viewing material online or as a download. Horatiu has posted his video podcasts to variety of sites( Blip.tv and YouTube)in order to encourage his pupils and others to download them to help in their studies.
We look forward to seeing more IB Physics Help video podcasts in the near future, and would like to hear of any other web 2.0 initiatives like this that are happening in IB schools around the world.
Although “best of…” posts tend to appear reasonably frequently, the good ones are worth their weight in gold. Here are a couple of blog posts summarising the best Web 2.0 applications of 2007, in so far as they relate to teaching and learning, and as proposed by Larry Ferlazzo and Silvia Tolisano:
Amazon have just announced a major new development in the ebook market. Called Kindle, it is pretty much a complete service package - from the hand-held hardware technology to the ability to browse, download or retrieve content. View the demo video for further details.
Why should we care? Well, I can see a number of potential uses in education. As more and more content becomes fully digital - by which I mean described in XML format - students can have direct access to reading lists and text-based course materials. In addition, because of its in-built dictionary and links to wikipedia, students can investigate words and phrases of which they are unsure. From the video, bookmarking and annotation look straight forward too.
Generally, its advantages include a hosted back-up service for all your purchased content, fast wifi connectivity using mobile phone network technologies (but no additional charges other than the download fee - currently $9.99 per book), a good screen and no syncing requirements with your pc.
I won’t be buying one yet though. At US$399 a pop, it’s not cheap. Furthermore, it’s another hand-held device to lug around - and therein lies the rub. My phone is pretty much becoming the ubiquitous computing device I need. Why should I invest in another piece of chunky technology that only delivers books, doesn’t play music and video, or allow me to read my emails, etc, etc, and, worse still, ties me into one provider?
The ultimate let-down for me, though, is the fact that Kindle charges for newspaper and blog content. How retro a step is that? I think Bezos was dancing with the fairies at the bottom of his garden when he came up with that particular business model.
Nevertheless, I have always had a soft spot for Amazon, ever since living overseas in the late 90s and it being the only effective means I had to get hold of books for my students. I shall therefore watch developments with interest and not dismiss the venture too hastily.
For those of you who enjoyed Michael Wesch’s first video, the Machine is Us/ing Us, you might want to have a look at his follow-up, Information R/Evolution:
Berkeley University, in California, have recently launched a series of recorded lectures on their own YouTube channel. You can find the current catalogue here: Berkeley University on YouTube. It clearly mirrors MIT’s Opencourseware initiative, started in 2001.
It raises the question yet again of where the real value in school- and university-based education lies: in the teacher delivering the content or the collaborative working and investigation by students around it.
Clearly, Berkeley and MIT believe it is in the latter, otherwise they wouldn’t be distributing this content for free. It is the formal accreditation and recognition that surrounds it, which they then charge (huge sums) for.
The trend towards deconstructing territories of learning (a phrase I’ve borrowed from a colleague referring to the classroom rather than a geographical region) continues and I look forward to its development.
In the meantime, have a look at this lecture on atoms and heat:
We knew it would only be a matter of time before the IB learning community began to inhabit media sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Here are two examples we’ve come across recently - both from YouTube.
The first is a PYP exhibition sample, contributed by students and teachers at the International School of Tianjin, China.
The second example is from a TOK student in the Diploma Programme. We don’t know who he is or where he’s from, as there are no end credits, but we think you’ll enjoy it nevertheless:
With either video, we make no claims as to their adherence to programme requirements. What we do want to do, though, is use them to highlight a number of important issues.
The first is that they’re two examples of students using new technologies to get a message across and show evidence of learning. This is something we will need to come to terms with as a curriculum and assessment authority, and particularly as an awarding body, in the future. Recognising student learning, when evidence of it is so dispersed on the web, will be a real challenge for us in the years ahead.
The second is that they’re both examples of resources which can help teachers in furthering their understanding of the programmes. Discussions around what’s good, and not so good, about them are invaluable for teachers as they attempt to come to terms with programme requirements and continuously improve their practice.
Thirdly, and as a corollary of the above two points, where these examples are located will increasingly be irrelevant. What is important is how we describe them (ie what metadata will we need to establish and use in order to tag these resources?) and how we link to them (ie how can we make use of the semantic web to go beyond a closed teacher resource exchange, such as that on the OCC?)
