Podcasts: The "Millennials" Are Coming

If you are an educator a podcast you don't want to miss, “The "Millennials" Are Coming” reported by Morley Safer of 60 Minutes fame, talks about the new generation of American workers we are educating right now.

Still new to podcasts? What are they- I know I’ve heard that word??

According to Wikipedia, "a podcast is a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers."

Blendededu.com has posted about the educational use of podcasts over the years - just to recap...

....podcasts can be used as: lecture captures, conversation prompts, writing prompts, as connections to field experts, to take your students on electronic field trips, to extend learning beyond the class period and beyond the classroom walls, as ‘teasers’ to excite students about upcoming events in your class, and to prep students with material or information needed before coming to class....

One great thing about podcasting is that you can listen to podcasts when you want to, any time- any day. No waiting ‘round the TV or radio. You can subscribe to a podcast via RSS Feed, so podcasts are ready for you when you are ready to listen.

You can also listen to your news sites via podcasts:

• CNN.com
• BBC.com Radio
• CBS News
  
• NPR

Here are a few podcast posts from the Blendededu.com archives to review:

• Podcasts as a Course Resource
• Scientific American Podcast
• Podcasts & Electronic Field Trips
• Questionmark Podcasts -Need Juice?
• More on Video Playing iPods
• Ten Podcasts to Build Your Vocabulary

Podcasts offer a wealth of information and learning for you and your students- just ask any student with earbuds dangling.

For a little 'lagniappe'- a tech-savvy, Mount professor shared a few favorite podcasts with us:

• Nature Podcasts
• Naked Scientists
• Business Week.com Podcasts
• Business Week Cover Stories
• HBR- Ideacast - Harvard Business Review
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies
• Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Policy
• ABC -All in the Mind

Or check out a Podcast Directory to find one to fit your own area of expertise:

• PodcastAlley.com
• Podcast.net
• Yahoo! Audio Search
• Digg Podcast Directory
• Podcast Pickle.com
• BBC Podcast Directory

If you have a favorite podcast you're using with your students – be sure to share it with us. Sharing is good.

2008 HP Technology for Teaching Grants

2008 Technology for Teaching Grants Open: HP has opened up its 2008 Technology for Teaching Grant program, offering $6 million to K-12 and higher education institutions in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

For this year's program, the Technology for Teaching Grant will award $3 million to K-12 schools and $3 million to two- and four-year colleges and universities. On the K-12 side, proposals will be accepted for programs covering any subject area, although, according to HP, the grant awards will favor science and math proposals.

The initiative is aimed at efforts to improve education through the use of innovative uses of technology in the classroom, increase the number of underrepresented students on a path toward high-tech careers, and enhance student success in math, science and engineering.

Don't Limit a Child to What We Know

"Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time."

This Rabbinical saying is so true today -talk to any digital native.

Don't limit them to what we are familiar with in terms of learning; don't limit their learning to the 50 minute class period, the 4 walls that make up the classroom, the technology that we know and the way we do things, but let them go search, research, explore the world through the new media tools that they know and are familiar with. Allow them the freedom to become passionate about what they find, to develop a vision of the world in which they will live, and let them create it. The world is at their fingertips waiting to be explored, for we were born in another time.

Jing Project

I found JING Project yesterday, at the same time a student was expressing her frustrations trying to capture an image on her PC laptop for a project she was doing....so I sent her JING, then I checked it out...

JING is a quite impressive little application.... it is something you can share with your students too.