Alex Ruthmann’s Blog

This July, I will be teaching a week-long summer course at Central Connecticut State University entitled Podcasts, Blogs, & Wiki’s… Oh My! This summer’s course will focus on using Web 2.0 tools and Ning social networks to extend and support K-College music classes. These tools provide an easy and collaborative way to get your music program online, to create online communities of practice, and to support student assessment.

Come on out to beautiful New Britain, Connecticut. Tuition, including 2 graduate credits, is only $500!

Here’s the official blurb:

Podcasts, Wikis & Blogs—Oh My!
In this hands-on class music teachers will develop strategies to support and extend student learning with online collaborative tools such as social networks, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. These tools provide easy ways to get your music classes online integrating text, video, and audio. Strategies for using these tools to facilitate assessment, writing across the curriculum, and reflective journaling, as well as to support performing, rehearsing, practicing, and composing will be explored. Applications of these tools in settings from elementary through college will be shared and developed. Prerequisite: None. Examples of tools for both Macs and PCs will be shared. Targeted for elementary, middle, high school and college levels, general music or ensembles.

50096 MUS 536, Sec 04, 2 credits, $500
July 7-11, 1:15–5:45 pm & Thurs 7-9:30 pm

More information and registration available at http://www.ccsusmi.com/

Today, I came across a new Amazon.com service called UnSpun. UnSpun is a social list creation and sharing site with some unique possibilities for supporting learning in classrooms.

For a while now, I have been looking for a Web 2.0 tool that would enable my students, after reading a post or article on one of my course blogs, to be able to easily post their own questions and/or comments to be shared with the whole class. The architecture of blogs inherently supports readers adding comments to posts. However, when you have a lot of posts to read from a large number of students in a course, it takes a long time for the instructor to read and synthesize the themes and issues that emerge in students’ responses. As a teacher, I often base my class discussions on the topics raised by students in their blog post responses. Since I began facilitating my classes through blogs and social networks, I’ve wanted an easy tool where students could centrally post their questions and comments and vote the most important questions/comments (to them) higher and lower (similar to Digg.com). Amazon’s UnSpun now gives me that functionality.

Check out an embedded UnSpun list in this blog post:

Now, UnSpun looks to be quite nice for what I’d like it to do. However, as with many third-party social networking and Web 2.0 tools, there are pros and cons:

Pros: Readers can easily add their own questions and comments, these are placed in a central box which can easily be placed anywhere on a blog through the widget/embed code functions, readers can vote questions and comments they view to be more relevant to them higher on the list. Voting up or down an existing comment or question does not require signing in.

Cons: Readers have to have an Amazon.com account, they have to sign in to that account when adding a question.

Middle Ground: If you click to add another question or comment, you are taken to your list on Amazon’s UnSpun website. Once on this site, you can edit your questions, merge duplicates (a good function for the teacher), and add comments. It might get a little complicated and confusing if students decide to add comments on this page… there seems to be no indication on the embeddable widget that comments exist on the UnSpun website.

So, UnSpun looks to be a promising tool at least worth trying with my students this coming semester. If anyone knows of other Web 2.0 tools with similar functionality, please let me know.

Back in the Fall of 2005 when I was first experimenting with Wikis in my middle school classroom, Eric Oatman, a news and features editor at the School Library Journal interviewed a number of teachers across the country (including me) about how we were using Wikis with our students.

The product of these interviews was an article on their website sharing a number of cool ways to integrate wikis into classes of all sorts. Though this article was written in 2005, it still provides a good overview of the possibilities of using wikis in your classroom. Since 2005, there have been many innovations in Wiki technology, most notably that many sites such as PBWiki.com and Wikispaces.com easily allow you and your students to create and manage wiki entries without having to know the special “markup” language many wiki interfaces required back in 2005. As with any technology, innovation continues and many become easier to use. Such has been the case with wikis over the past three years.

Back when I originally created the Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing for my middle school students, I browsed around and tested a number of free wiki sites and finally settled on PBWiki.com. I still use PBWiki today for my college classes because of its ease of use and multimedia features.

Since installing their new “point and click” interface back in January, users can now easily upload and post photos and streaming videos from YouTube, streaming audio from YackPack.com, add a chat room, install Google Gadgets, among other things.

As I have continued to experiment with wikis in music-related classes, the ability for students to create entries embedded with video and audio has become important. Though most wikis are optimized for textual and, to an extent, photographic-based collaboration, my students are moving toward conveying their ideas in audio and video form. Earlier this week Mojiti.com, previously featured on my blog here, released a new set of features that my students are already beginning to take advantage of.

The latest updates to Mojiti include:

• Multimedia annotations. Users can overlay/embed their own audio or video into a video.
• Freehand drawing support. Users can add their own Madden-style writing overlays.
• Mojiti-to-go Bookmarklet. This feature enables you to add a plug-in to your web browser which allows you to add Mojiti features to any streaming video hosted on the web.

Watch below or click here to see the new features in action.

Mojiti.com and Ning.com

Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:

• Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
• In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
• In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.

Click here to see Mojiti in action.

Ning.com (special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.

This past year, Time Magazine named “You” (actually, all of us) as Person of the Year. This was done in part because of a recent paradigm shift in the Internet from being a vast, hyperlinked repository of information created by others, to the a second generation Internet (often referred to as Web 2.0)where all users can easily generate and post their own content and collaborate with others around the world.

Through new online technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites, as well as online audio and video sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Odeo, anyone can easily post and share rich content to the web. These new online collaborative tools offer great possibilities for enhancing music learning and teaching experiences.