After UIL today, I popped into a CD with Ray Charles. My daughter rolled her eyes but woke up when “Hit the Road, Jack!” started coming out over the speakers. It’s a great song because tomorrow, I hit the road (and I’ll hope they let me come back!). Bethann Oswald–TCEA Area 9 Director–invited me to attend the event to present LAST year, but I couldn’t since my Dad died. So, I was delighted to get a second opportunity to attend, and I’m grateful to her for the invite. Of course, twice invited means 4x the pressure to do a good job. I’m doing 4 sessions there (you can find all the materials online). The sessions are:

1. Podcast Panoply
2. Blog Your World!
3. Tag Literacy: Social Bookmarking Your Life!
4. FlickrFun

So, tomorrow (Sunday), I’m off to Wichita Falls, Texas for the TCEA Area 9 Conference. It’s a 6.5 hour trip, and I have all those K12 Online Conference.org podcasts. Yes, ALL of them. Not to mention a few others that I recently recorded, but haven’t posted yet (oops…I’m so behind). Six hours just won’t be enough for the over 45 podcasts I’m packing in my iRiver T10, but you never know. I, of course, have been working on my presentations for the last two weeks, and should have known better than to look at them again tonight. As soon as I saw them, I started revising them again. Sheesh.

One of the key points for me as I reflect on my presentation composition process is that in the past, I would have never used other people’s stuff as freely as I do now. Now, those inhibitions are gone. Every time I go online, I am struck by how brilliant all of you are–really! I wonder, how could I ever have come up with stuff like that?

Since I like to include video in my presentations, my search for videos now involves going to TeacherTube, YouTube, and Google Video (in that order, too) to find the content. I found two excellent videos (Dorothy Burt from PT England School and Bob Sprankle’s Room 208 vodcast) for my Podcast Panoply workshop, not to mention a great one from Wes Fryer (SpeedofCreativity.org) on using Gabcast and VoiceThread.

In the past, I would have felt the need to be an expert in every tool I shared…now, I realize I can’t be. If Wes has explored Gabcast and VoiceThread to the nth degree, then that’s fantastic and I am able to rely on him without actually knowing it myself right now. I can learn with my audience. It’s a scary feeling, but it’s one that was reinforced by my listening to Tony Stead, as well as reading his book, and then, re-reading Nanci Atwell’s In the Middle.

In writing, you are always composing, always working to make it better. Donald Graves writes (as cited in Atwell’s In the Middle):

We’ll spend a lifetime crafting our teaching in order to allow children to be the authors of their own texts.

This reminds me of Bolman and Deal’s quote about the leader’s responsibility, as written in Leading with Soul:

Leader’s responsibility is to create conditions that promote authorship.

It’s also that idea of CONSTANTLY writing, composing, and with the Read/Write web, publishing. These are powerful ideas for me, and the Read/Write Web tools that are available make it possible. When else could I have had access to panoply of resources? If I want to teach blogging, videos abound. If I want to teach podcasting, videos about how to do that and how to prepare educational podcasts by students (Bob Sprankle’s Room 208 vodcast is precious) and/or teachers (e.g. Dorothy Burt’s enhanced podcast at TeacherTube.com) are available. They are exactly what’s needed.

Yet, sometimes, because of your brilliance, I have to struggle to maintain my own voice, to remember that the experience of the presentation for the audience isn’t that they’re coming to listen to everyone else–although that’s a plus–but rather, that they’re coming to hear MY story. In a world full of non-fiction, it’s clear that personal voice adds a sense of depth (Is That a Fact? by Tony Stead) to writing. Tony cites Donald Graves in his book, Is that a fact? as saying:

Unfortunately, little nonfiction, beyond personal narrative, is practiced in classrooms. Children are content to tell their own stories, but the notion that someone can write about an idea and thereby affect the lives and thinking of others is rarely discussed.

For me, blogs provide the avenue to do this. It’s such an obvious connection, I want to jump up and down in front of folks and share it with them. Tony offers the concept of baskets (actually, he probably has baskets like the one shown to the right in mind), including Title of Basket and Type of Non-Fiction that goes with that. He mentions that most of the non-fiction/fiction books in one classroom library–over 3000–were not appropriate. Here’s what he writes:

3,000 books is a lot of material for one classroom. . .Margo [the teacher] told me that when she sorted her books she found that only 20 percent of them were nonfiction, and most of these were descriptive books about animals, only one aspect of nonfiction. What was more surprising was that of the relatively new nonfiction books she had, about 80 percent were at reading levels way above where the majority of her children were reading…Margo needed not only to purchase more nonfiction material but also to ensure that the texts chosen were matched to the needs and abilities of her children.

When I read Tony Stead’s writing on types of non-fiction, I’m immediately drawn to the idea that, wouldn’t it be great to classify student-generated writing in blogs by non-fiction areas? And, since audio is such a big part of oral comprehension for children reading non-fiction, wouldn’t podcasts fit right in? Eric Langhorst does a neat job of this with his Speaking of History Studycasts…

“One of the most effective uses of podcasts for my students was the creation of StudyCasts,” Langhorst told Education World. “I began recording an audio review to help my students prepare for upcoming unit tests. With my portable MP3 player, I record an overview of the important material. I then transfer the audio, which lasts about 20 minutes, to my computer, and then upload the MP3 file to our classroom Web site. Students then are able to listen to the study review at home on their computers or download it to their personal MP3 players; they can review for the test anywhere.”
Source: EducationWorld

While this is neat stuff, what about having students write the nonfiction and record their own podcasts for posting? Would that work? I know that book publishers are cringing, but there are so many of us writing non-fiction out here in the blogosphere, posting podcasts, it seems a “no-brainer” to harness that. But how to do it? Tags for non-fiction help, but we might have to use a standard. Why not use Tony’s?

Tony identifies these areas:

• Animals – Description
• Space – Description
• The Oceans – Description
• Dinosaurs – Description
• Countries – Description
• Sports – Description
• People and Their Jobs – Description/Nonfiction narrative
• Celebrations – Description/NonFiction narrative
• Recipes – Instructions
• How to Make – Instructions
• How to Care For – Instructions
• How to Do – Instructions
• Atlases and Maps – Instructions
• How and Why – Scientific Explanations
• Experiments – Scientific Exploration
• Autobiographies and Biographies – Nonfiction Narrative
• Past Events – Nonfiction narrative
• What Do You Think – Persuasion

As I read this, the question going around in my mind, is this too limiting? Are there more categories that aren’t listed here? Maybe I haven’t read far enough, but it’s certainly fascinating to consider the implications.