Digital Learning

This is WAAAAYY cool! The potential for live, interactive broadcasts of all types may now be possible with the new “Co-host” feature of ustream.  Perhaps interactive review casts, virtual classroom speakers, parent webcasts, etc.  Here is a video about the new co-host functionality:

Jeramay-

This rocks so far. A few questions for tweaking the network:

1. Podpress does not support direct uploading of files, correct? It looks like we have to add media to the media gallery, grab the media URL, and add that URL when building the podcast. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice if podpress supported direct uploading
2. Steve and I will work out how we’re going to create user accounts. We’re still not totally certain about this as our students don’t all have their own school domain email accounts. I wish we could come up with a way to get them all an email address, as this was such a slick way to create an account and blog and I think it will work well for students. At a minimum, could we supply you with a list of user names /temporary passwords that you could upload into the database?
3. Themes-would you add as many themes as possible to the system? I’d like our users to have many themes available to them.
4. Front page-I totally dig what you did with that Urban Milwaukee site…will you build up some type of really cool front end like that for us?? I really want to make this cool so our students and teachers use it and buy into it…our students will be pretty excited the front/login page has a really modern/web2.0ish look and feel…front page should show login area, recent blog updates, 10 most recent posts if possible, photo gallery from the middle school flickr account
5. I noticed that each blog is limited to 100 MB of storage…is there any way we can crank this up, or did you just choose a default for starters?
6. User Profiles…can we have the ability to add a picture/avatar to the profiles??
7. Aggregating network wide blogs by either categories and/or tags. This is something we’ll need so teachers can quickly and easily track student blogs/posts.
8. What about embedding YouTube videos and other related media directly in posts?? Anarchy media plugin is probably needed. Perhaps a plugin like this one might work: http://wpmudev.org/project/Anarchy-Media-Player
9. Better Blog RSS subscribe widget

Summer is here and we finally have a student and teacher blogging system up and running! “USM Blogs” is the name of the new website, and some middle school teachers and students will be starting to use this a bit during the 2008-2009 school year! This has been several years in the making and I’m quite excited about the possibilities that this creates for our teachers and students. Imaging students being able to create a digital portfolio via their blog that allows them to keep a history of the wonderful work they do in art, music, social studies, english, etc! Stay tuned for mor

Anyway, I wanted to simply try out a few features of this blogging platform. Below is a podcast recording of an interview a few of our 5th grade students conducted in May with Jeff Wilson, our 6th grade literature teacher extraordinnaire!

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 Interview with Mrs. Wilson! [2:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1)