I have a blog set up for my students for enrichment problems. Last year, this was a daily posting with 12 followers; this year, so far, I have made it a weekly posting with only 2 followers. I've got a very different group of students this year. I have also used a blog in the past for a meeting place of sorts where I used links to Poll Everywhere in order to collect student responses during the class period. I have replaced this blog with a wiki this year, though I have to work on getting the Poll Everywhere links to work from the wiki.
I have used podcasts, really just audio recordings, for Mind Gymnastics exercises. I found that I was having troubles reading the exercises in a consistent manner over the course of four class periods. So, I began recording them using Audacity and storing them in my email storage through my school. Recently I have put together a sound clip of a brook from Partners In Rhyme and looped it to cover about 2.5 minutes, a little more than the length of a typical Mind Gymnastics set. I have used this brook mp3 as a second layer on the Mind Gymnastics recordings. The result is the sound of a brook babbling in the background and during the 'silent' sections. Hopefully, this will allow the students some 'focus noise' for times when the background noise in the classroom (one wall of my classroom is removable) can be distracting. I discovered this past week that it is convenient to post these recordings on the wiki when I am gone, allowing an assigned group of students to run the Mind Gymnastics for the class off of their computer.
In addition, I have started to record screencasts of course notes using Smart Notebook 10 and Screen Toaster. At this point I have just pre-recorded the notes, but I would eventually like to run a recording during class. I have also made a 'Homework Help' screencast of exercises assigned as homework. I am trying to make the videos so the homework is only started for the students. Though I successfully created the screencast, I found the process to be cumbersome. It's really hard to figure out what I would record and what to skip over. This will be a project that I will continue to improve based on student and parent feedback. So far I have use Smart Notebook 10 and Screen Toaster to create the screencast, but I am considering using Microsoft OneNote instead.
To share the screencasts, I have created a page in the class wiki, in each of the appropriate Investigation Folders (just one right now), and made a link to the video page from the frontpage of the wiki. The screencasts are embedded on this page along with tutorial videos.
I think Twitter could be a good substitution for a calling tree as long as everyone subscribed to SMS notifications to the group. The tweets could be early notifications of snow days or for emergencies. The primary hurdle I can forsee is contacting people without cell phones. In this case, I think an actual calling tree can be created with significantly fewer participants.
I have created a Facebook group for my 7th grade math students. I am amazed that so many 'under 13' kids have accounts. It was this discovery, however, that encouraged me to take advantage of the 2.0 tool. Out of the 23 participants, there have only been 3 that have had to create an account. The others were already users. The purpose of the group is to receive early notifications of postings to the CMS Math Challenge blog, notifications of tutorial videos and screencasts of notes and assignment help, and discussions that gather student opinions. So far the responses to postings have been slow. Kids talk about belonging to the group in class, but no one has taken advantage of the links to my knowledge. I guess that is a good thing, though, as long as it's indicating that the kids aren't on Facebook very often. I appreciate the way I can administer the group without being a friend to my students.
CMS Math 7 Facebook Group
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