Marybeth O'Brien’ Blog

Podcasting

Marybeth O'Brien — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:46:09 +0000

Greetings DEN Members,

This summer vacation sure has flown by! There is no better way to get back into the swing of things than by taking a few workshops. My district sent me to a hands-on Apple Professional Development Podcasting Institute. As a techie, I was thrilled to be going, for one reason above all others was that we were given the IPOD Classic/Video with an 80GB memory. This was such a perk! This workshop was well paced, we were all comfortable to ask questions and work with the information given. We used a great deal of Mac applications like garageband and iphoto. These programs were so user friendly that it put my PC to shame. However, this is nothing to hold the PC users back…the members of the class were so helpful that we all pooled our resources and shared quite a few ideas for making this just as easily adapted to that of the PC. The pc version of garage band is that of Acoustica’s MixCraft 4. Both programs allow you to create a voice recording, add pictures, music, and sound effects and animate in some ways. As part of the institute we created little movies using the Aesop’s Fables. It was really fun, and super easy! I can’t wait to create some great things for my students to use.

I would like to share some great websites that we learned about:

www.podomatic.com is a great site that allows you to publish and create your own podcasts.

www.pics4learning.com allows you to download pictures without worrying about copyrights.

www.soundsnap.com has a library full of sound effects that you can download and use again without worrying about those pesky copyright laws.

www.pbwiki.com is a wiki site that allows you to communication and discuss things with your students…a lot of the teachers in the training were already using this and LOVE it. I can’t wait to try it

As we went through this workshop I realized that I was already creating Podcasts with my students we just weren’t publishing them to a wiki. So I decided to take some of the projects created by my students last year and turn them into podcasts. I published them to iTunes. I was limited at one point because it was not in an iTunes format…rest assured, someone offered a great alternative. The site www.ZAMZAR.com is a free convertion website. I simply uploaded my project to this site, identified the file extension I wanted to convert it to (IPOD) and in a few minutes, I was emailed a link to download the new version! It was fabulous!

I hope you have an opportunity to take a course like this! It was so much fun and so eyeopening to the things you can do!

Give Rice to The Hungry

Marybeth O'Brien — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:10:18 +0000

Throughout the world, natural disasters have struck leaving many people hungry. As my students learn more about the Myanmar tragedy and the Myanmar’s governments neglect to provide aide, they have discussed their desire to help. A website www.freerice.com is a website that allows them to do just that. There is no sign-up necessary! Students go to this website and play a vocabulary game. Words are presented and students are asked to choose the synonym. The students love to play and they learn new words. The whole time they are playing, they are infact helping to donate rice to the hungry. For each word the player gets correct, 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger. This game has been online since October 2007. I wish I had known about it sooner! To date, 32,538,647,330 grains of rice have been donated through this game. Yesterday, 193,454,560 grains of rice were donated! This is an amazing program! Our class is going to play as much as we can to help!

Myanmar and students

Marybeth O'Brien — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:03:48 +0000

I think it is truly important to expose students to the happenings in the world around them. A great way to inform students of current events is through the use of CNN Student News, http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/ This is a free tool that teachers may sign-up for. Each night, an e-mail is sent in that you may preview the content. For the most part, the content is appropriate for my fourth grade students. About three times a week, we watch the 10 minute segment and then discuss the content. The reals focused on the Presidential Election have proven to be a great resource. This past week we focused on the tragedy of the cyclone that hit Myanmar. My students have been motivated to write their own news stories to inform their fellow school mates about the tragedy. Discovery Atlas has provided to be a great resource as well. We used Atlas to locate Myanmar and learn about the people, government, customs, and history using the short video segments. I used the Writing Prompts Teacher Tool to create the News Story Assignment. Our class wrote great news stories to demonstrate their understanding of the event and share their feelings about the tragedy. I am impressed with the caliber of work produced by these fourth graders. Their enthusiasm and motivation was enhanced through the use of the technology and tools provided by Discovery Streaming!

Get to Know Me!

Marybeth O'Brien — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:41:15 +0000

I am excited to be a member of the DEN. I am a fourth grade educator at the Huntington Elementary School in Brockton, MA. This past year, myself, along with 4 of my colleagues, wrote and were awarded the Hewlett Packard Technology for Teaching Grant. Through the professional development provided by this grant, we purchased a license for Discovery Streaming. Since that time, I have used Streaming in my daily planning and teaching practice. Our team has recently been awarded the Leadership Grant in conjunction with the HP Technology for Teaching Grant which we are truly excited about as we may now extend all of the benefits of the grant to 10 more of our colleagues and their classrooms. We have shared the benefits of Discovery Streaming with our IT Director and persuaded him to extend the services to the rest of the District.

The Brockton Public Schools is classified as an urban school district and has a diverse student body with varying cultures, interests, and family backgrounds. Each classroom at the Huntington School is dynamic and unique. My classroom community includes 23 students of whom 17 have a secondary native language. It is important that I do all I can to provide students with the learning experience that allows them to gain a greater understanding of concepts. Lessons must be rich with vocabulary, and provide background information on a variety of topics. As educators we know that it is extremely important to provide relevant background knowledge and content that draws on the experiences of the students. Discovery Education Streaming has provided us with so many resources to supplement the curriculum and provide students with the comprehensible input needed to access the curriculum. It has engaged my students and motivated them to become independent researchers and constructivist learners in their own right. Each day, streaming is used as a natural component of instruction and learning. As we learn about current events, we turn to Discovery ATLAS to learn more about the relative location of countries, identify the qualities of the country that fit within the 5 themes of Geography, and become active investigators to answer our own questions.

Although I have only been using Discovery Education Streaming for a year, we have found so many uses for it in our classroom. In our recent study of the Solar System, we created our own News Broadcast using Discovery’s editable videos and Movie Maker! The students were amazed that they could be “producers” of their own News Broadcast. In addition, we have been practicing with some of the Web 2.0 programs and the images provided by streaming to create discussion forums using voicethread.com and creating videos using animoto.com. Discovery Streaming has so much to offer, our community can’t wait to exhaust its every resource!

I am looking forward to being a member of the DEN to learn from its members and expand on the resources Discovery has to offer!