Chris Lehmann was interviewed yesterday on what appears to be the NEW EdTechTalk, sub-titled, 21st Century Learning Webcast — anchored now by Alex Ragone and Arvind Grover.
Principal of the soon to open, and certainly to be “something new,” high school, the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Lehmann answered some pointed questions, such as, “What’s an old english teacher doing, leading a science focused high school?” Correction: if you met Chris, you’d swear he isn’t more than 28, but he is. The picture to the right is Chris with MIT Media Lab Director, Nicholas Negroponte.
A podcast of the interview is now available, but what I’d like to point your attention to is something that Chris mentions in one of yesterday’s Practical Theory blog entries.
Why wouldn’t we have our kids doing this? (Answer — we should have our kids doing this!)
Lehmann continues…
With Skype and some good add-on software (and a quick google search of “Record Skype Calls” found several solutions worth trying), our kids can be up and podcasting interviews in no time. When our kids are researching, wouldn’t they want to use this technology to talk to experts in the field? When they are publishing their 21st Century research projects, now they can pull in audio clips of those experts into their final presentations. What does it mean that we can partner with other schools out there to create these podcasts with these tools?
Podcast on EdTech Talk – Practical Theory
I’d like to add another angle to this. Chris’ enthusiasm about his experience leads me to wonder what students might gain from being interviewed themselves. As students complete their research papers, Hyperstudio Stacks, web sites, or any other kind of research-based information product, we should begin to refer to the young scholars as experts in that area, and offer them up for interview by other classes, in other locations. The distances could be geographic. They may also be age, where younger students in another class, use Skype to interview an older students who just completed research in an area of curricular interest.
What do you think?
technorati tags:chrislehmann, edtechtalk, skype, sla
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I couldn’t agree more… One of the projects I’m hoping SLA gets involved in is working with the One Laptop Per Child folks so that we can partner up with a school in a developing nation. Think of the interviews the kids could do of each other… Think about what it might mean for SLA kids to be interviewed by students in other places about what it means to be an SLA student. Think about how the kids could interview each other and tell their own stories…
Me? Excited for September? Naaaaaah. 🙂
Jeff and I are really lucky to have Alex and Arvind join the ETT community.
As part of a summer session I am doing with teachers in July, I will be showing how to use iChat and Garageband to record interviews. It is very simple and the software is free.
We will have a number of small MacBook clusters in some of our schools next year and it will be great to implement new ways of having students demonstrate their learning.
Cheers… Bob
Bob, Garageband is hardly free as it requires a new Mac! (or an upgrade for people with older versions of iLife).
You can also now easily record Skype on the Mac thanks to Ecamm software.
Chris is awesome and he is truly a visionary. We sure did pick the right first guest, no?
Thanks again to Dave Cormier and Jeff Lebow for their amazing support for our show.
As for using Skype or any other broadcast an assessment, or create inter class or age group discussions, I know it’s a wonderful idea. The more we teach our students to be teachers, the better. The authentic sharing of knowledge is what our conversation was about on Friday, and hopefully that same type of work can be modeled for and by our students.