I love using digital media in the classroom. Podcasts, videos, music, pictures, blogs are all digital media that can be effectively used in the classroom to teach and engage students. One of my favorite tools to show teachers is Radio Lab which is a podcast that explores science, human experiences, and sociology. There are two main ways I coach teachers to use Radio Lab in the classroom. The first is to spark curiosity to set students up to learn and give them a reason for their learning. For example, this clip from podcast 5 of season 6 entitled “Numbers” talks about a mathematical phenomenon called Benford’s Law. Benford’s Law states that in a random set of numbers ones and twos will occur more than eights and nines. Initially, that may not seem too exciting, so, during the first couple minutes of the podcast, after the basic information about Benford’s Law has been explained, I conduct a hands-on test of it. I have students to take a dollar bill and read off the serial numbers; this experiment has never failed to support Benford’s La. That’s when it starts to become interesting to them. The Radio Lab podcast makes this weird math fact very interesting by having witty dialogue and easy to undertand explanations of complex information. As the podcast progresses, experts talk about the applications of Benford’s Law such as catching criminals, detecting tax evaders, and verifying the validity of data sets.
When I present to educators, I like using this example because it addresses higher level mathematics, requires students to think about the role of patterns in everyday life, and demonstrated how formulating questions and discovering answers can have a major impact on our lives. Additionally, podcasts like Radio Lab provide general knowledge that many students, especially students with disabilities and English Language Learners, often are missing. This deficit in general knowledge can have a negative impact their learning (Robb). Exposing students to information that is interesting and engaging allows all students the opportunity to build general knowledge so it can be accessed later to help build new learning.
Radio Lab is a great resource for students in high school, but podcasts are not just for older students. There are podcasts for younger students as well. Brains On! is a great podcast for upper elementary and middle school students. This podcast explores interesting science questions. I love their podcast on boogers because it is totally gross, a bit of a taboo subject, and a totally legitimate biological function that I cannot and do not want to explain to students. It is the perfect way for students to pick up (pun intended) good information. Podcasts are great auditory learning tools; their counterpart in the visual learning realm would be infographics. Infographics are documents created to provide the reader with a great deal of information presented in a way that is visual. My favorite tool for creating infographics is www.easel.ly. Check out this infographic about Virtual Reality that I created. Easelly has great resources to help teachers and students create infographics. Their Tutorial can help you get started. The trend in communication is moving towards move visual types of communication. Check out this article Fastcompany.com to learn more about why visual communication is booming. Knowing this trend is here to stay, teaching students to read visual information such as infographics is a critical literacy need! If I had to choose one tool to help students become more aware of their world, build an understanding of the diversity that exists around them, and increase their global awareness it would be Twitter. Twitter gives students immediate information about what is going on in the world around them faster than any newspaper, news cast, or radio station can report. Also, when students follow real people from around the world, they get primary documents (tweets) directly from the sources. Quiz time! Who tweeted this statement: “Most of my team are women. I thank them - and call on every government minister and leader tomorrow to celebrate their female team members!” Could it be President Trump? It could be, but in the US we do not have government ministers. Could it be Katy Perry or Justin Bieber who each have over 90 million Twitter followers? Probably not. Actually, this is a tweet from His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, or HH Sheikh Mohammed as his seven million Twitter followers know him. He is promoting the 2017 International Women’s Day and showing his support of women’s rights in a part of the world that often does not give women the same freedom and rights as men. Twipolmacy is a phenomenal source for information about the social networking of the world’s most influential people. It collects data on the social networking of leaders across the world and complies the data from their Twitter accounts to empirically show how world leaders communicate and the impact their communication has. They generate a list of the 50 most influential world leaders each year (click on the hyperlink to see 2016’s list). Having a scroll of the Twitter feeds of all world leaders playing in a classroom would be incredibly powerful to students. When students study about faraway places or countries they have never heard of, this type of information can help them build a connection, empathy, and understanding of the world around them. The tweet from HH Sheikh Mohammed may not seem like a big deal unless you know about the plight of women in Middle Eastern countries. So, a shout out to women who are working may not mean much when it comes from most people, suddenly carries a great weight when students can see that it comes from a leader of a country that is trying to speak out against humanitarian issues in a region of the world where women suffer atrocities every day. #Powerful! Without technology and the ability to connect to people throughout the world, students might not be able to make the connections to diversity and awareness on a global scale. Their backyard or apartment complex seems like the whole world to them. I remember that feeling as a child; I remember thinking everyone was like me, and everyone had the luxuries I had. That is all I knew. Students today can access the worldwide web anytime to see and hear what is going on around the world. Check out this video at Discovery VR to see and hear an African woman’s story about surviving with HIV in a third world country. Virtual reality lets people feel what it is like to walk in someone else’s shoes. Hearing Doris’s story, seeing her world, and walking with her though her village adds a dimension to her life that is hard to get through a two-dimensional video. Virtual reality is a very new way to invoke understanding and empathy for issues that occur outside of our students’ immediate, tangible worlds. On Discovery VR students can jump into other worlds, virtually. While VR goggles will make the experience more realistic with a 360-degree view, students can view the video on a mobile device and appreciate the experience without goggles just by moving the device around. Robb, Laura. "Teach Kids to Build Their Own Prior Knowledge." MiddleWeb. N.p., 23 Aug. 2016. Web. 07 Mar. 2017. <https://www.middleweb.com/13223/teach-students-build-prior-knowledge/>.
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Ana HaleHula Hoop Champion, 1980 Crestwood Middle School (I can't believe I peaked in the '80s) Archives
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