Podcasting and Teaching
Over at my other site, I started to put together some podcasts, a feature that I call "Two Teachers On Teaching" (TTOT for short). Before I went full throttle into my home improvement project, I sat down with Rushton (the one TTOT podcast that's online) and Laurie (still sitting on my computer, waiting to be edited). Through talking with Michele today, I see another application of this idea.
Michele came up with the idea that we should get together by grade level and discuss the novels we teach, a kind of book talk. Jane, Michele, and I sat down for a while and talked about The Scarlet Letter; we had scheduled a book talk for Hamlet, but it never happened. Now that Michele is back, so is the idea for book talks. What if a few things changed for this version of the book talks?
What if I set a digital voice recorder up in the room to record the whole thing? Without getting too Big Brother on people, we'd be in a position to listen to that book talk just before we are about to teach the novel we discussed. We'd be in a position to carry on the conversation we started at the book talk. An idea mentioned during the talk might have sounded like a good one at the time but, now that we're actually teaching the novel, the idea doesn't pan out so well. Since the talk is recorded and available, we could redirect questions at colleagues through email or side conversations at the lunch table. If the talk is good enough (or just edited well enough), we could make it available to other teachers or even other students.
So many good thoughts get lost in the shuffle of the day. I talked with Michele, Vanessa, Laurie, Julie, and Bjorn for a total of about 2 hours. I will probably forget much of what was said. I don't suggest that every conversation be recorded (*that* would be getting too Big Brother), but even just a blog entry like this after the conversation would help keep the ideas alive.
That's really what I'm concerned about: keeping ideas alive.
posted by todd @ 4:51 PM
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