Presentation at Western High School

Yesterday afternoon I facilitated the staff meeting at Walled Lake Western High School that I wrote about in my November 12 entry. The presentation went very well, I think. As part of the presentation, I invited a teacher to assist as we created a podcast on the fly – thank you Brian Blackney! The teachers could see how easy it was to hook up a microphone, open Audacity, and record an audio file. We converted the file to an mp3. Listen to this podcast, titled “President Bush on Podcasting.” (10 seconds)

The teachers were given a few minutes to brainstorm ideas of what they might do as a result of the presentation – ideas for personal and classroom use. I recorded their ideas with the digital voice recorder that came on my mp3 player. You will want to listen to their ideas. (about 10 minutes)

One thing I regret ...I forgot to mention during the presentation about the project that Anna Murphy recently completed with her senior English students. It is a great example of how you can embed 21^st century skills into the school day. Her students selected one piece of writing that they were/are proud of, then found images and music to go along with it. Anna shared a few of the videos with me and they are outstanding! I have tremendous respect for Anna; she stepped out of her comfort zone, dealt with technical difficulties, and maintained a positive attitude throughout the process. She told me that her students really appreciated the assignment and that she learned a great deal. Another teacher chimed in, saying that many of the teachers in the English department, due to Anna’s encouragement, now carry flash drives on their key chains.