Using Teachnology

The last couple of weeks my school has really engaged with the different technologies available for teaching.

For my VCE Biology students a colleague and I held a seminar where we recorded a number of students questions about concepts they wanted to know more about on the iPhone and then proceeded to answer them using a microphone and Audacity and a little bit of Garageband for background music. In all we made 4 podcast episodes. Which we added to teachertube and then embedded into the student's information Blog.



See more Audio at TeacherTube.com.


The exam for this unit is on Tuesday so I am hoping they use these to help them and they are all studying right now :-)

The ability to Podcast and Screencast is becoming popular at my school as well as being able to find the best online whiteboard / file sharing / chat place, if you have any ideas for the best place please leave a comment below as I am interesting in finding out as it is really hard finding something that works well on a school network.


Wordle and Quizlet are the next two favourites. As literacy is becoming a whole school focus there is a real focus on the different strategies that can be used.
I have used Wordle to help students "Get knowledge Ready" and to either create a similar wordle in MS Word or define some of the key terms that are in the wordle.

I love Wordle and other teachers are now using for all sorts of engagement ideas too.

I placed all the key words and their definintions from Quizlet used in Biology for the semester and created a really interesting Wordle of the key terms.


The ease of Quizlet is great, the ability to create a word list and their definitions in half an hour and then that Word List having endless possibilities for students to use and it all being free is fantastic. It has been taken on by older staff members. If you haven't starting using Quizlet for your students then you are definitely missing out.

I might actually try and make a screencast for that today :-)

So the technologies mentioned today are:

Podcasting - Iphone, Audacity, Microphone, Garageband (or some sample music)
Screencasting - Can be done with SnagIT, Jing, Camtastia and probably a million more different types of software
Literacy Tools - Wordle and Quizlet.