Thursday, February 10, 2011

Podcast Reflection#5: Moving at the Speed of Creativity

This podcast by Wesley Fryer was broadcast from the 2011 MECA conference which stands for the Mississippi Educational Computing Association. The speaker that was at the center of the podcast was Dr. Carl Owens who is a professor at Tennessee Tech University. The title of the lecture that he was giving was "Cool Tools for the Classroom." He gave examples of a variety of cool technology tools that he and his students have used and tools that could (and have been ) used in the classroom.

One tool that he talked about to use in the classroom was podcasting. Along with podcasting he mentioned a lot of gadgets that are out there that can help improve the quality of the podcast that you and your class are creating. The first tool that he mentioned was called a "bass jump." This simply helps to give richer sound to your podcast because he mentioned that sometimes the sound on Mac's is not always the best but that this tool can really help to enhance it. He also talked about a couple of different microphones that are really simple to use when making a podcast. The two he mentioned were called Snowflake and Snowball microphones. Dr. Owens really liked these two microphones because they are pretty cheap, all you have to do is plug them into your computer and they are pretty sturdy not a lot of repair is needed for them.

The next tool Dr.Owens talked about was a microscope called "pro-scope." This is a hand-held microscope that is compatible with Mac's and PC's and also the iPhone, iPad and iTouch. On pro-scope's website there a many lesson plans available for teachers to use. The website also includes various ways that you can incorporate the pro-scope into your classroom and how it can be used as a great tool for teaching and learning, especially in content areas such as science.

Another tool that Dr.Owen's really liked was call the iTV Hybrid. This program can be installed on Mac computers and allows you to do TV capturing, which basically means that teachers can record educational programs via their computer and then show them to their students. Programs can be recorded in advance and can be saved on the computer for a few days or even for years. It is a much simpler way of recording shows without having to use a video recorder that you often would have to check out from the school librarian. A tool that is similar to this but not quite as new and advanced that Dr. Owen's talked about is Radio Shark. It is basically the same idea as the iTV Hybrid. This program allows you to record local radio stations so that you can play them back for your students later.

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