Podcasting and more copyright

More on copyright. After I handed in the staff development project, I started workign hard to catch up on my Simpson reading. It's a good thing I did because this week we were asked to discuss chapters 12 & 13 on the discussion board. I'm all caught up and I was able to discuss it fairly intelligently.

I really liked these two chapters of Simpson...particularly the chapter where Simpson discusses how to balance managing copyright in a school without becoming the person everyone avoids. I certainly do not want to make enemies of all the other teachers in the school I work in some day. I think it is very important that the rest of the staff gets some education on this issue. It is not fair for the librarian having the sole responsibility for it simply because we've had training.

As for podcasting, I had never heard of podcasting before the start of this class. This semester I have listened to several podcasts, both for this class and for my other class. I've also found some that are purely for my own entertainment. I listened to a little bit of the podcasting that the kids in Mr Coley's class created. It sounds like the kids had fun with it. Was it an absolutely necessary tool to use? Probably not, but maybe it's good in that it increases their excitement about learning. It certainly reinforces what they learn by having them create a podcast about it. I can see podcasts being very useful in education. My son has recently started listening to entertaining podcasts called "Adventures in Odyssey" which can be found here.

Screencasts are another fairly new tool to use. I've seen several screen casts and have actually used them to learn how to use different tools on the web. I just didn't know what they were called.