Workshop on Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts
We taught a workshop today called Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, Oh My!, and it seemed to go really well. We had twenty people, and we spent the day visiting educational weblogs like Glen Malone’s, learning how to use Bloglines, creating Blogger accounts, making podcasts with Odeo, and messing around with a wiki in Wikispaces. Along the way we had a lot of interesting discussion about the differences betweens blogs, wikis, forums, what the heck all of this means in the lives of our students and how (or whether) we should be applying this in our classrooms.
It occurred to me after the class that most of what we talked about today was stuff I was completely unaware of twelve months ago. And I am, in the words of my son, a professional nerd. How on earth should we be expecting teachers to be coming to grips with the stuff yet? The main challenge in teaching the workshop was deciding on what information to share, and what not to share to keep from overwhelming everyone.
My observation from the workshop is that there was a lot of excitement and interest by the participants, but there still needs to be some streamlining of the technology. For instance, Blogger is cool, but you still need to mess around in html code if you want to customize your page to any degree. No normal person should ever have to mess with html code.
And, of course, virutally none of the example systems we used are school-friendly. I know, however, that there are more education-oriented products on the way (or in place, like David Warlick’s ClassBlogMeister, and once they are widely available, I think things may reallllly take off.