Embedding audio in a web page

LINK TO DRAFT OF FELTING TUTORIAL

I worked on another project for Web II today because I want to learn the various ways of embedding audio in a web page. I made my six audio files with the free Web 2.0 utility Odeo, and editted them with Audacity. I found the code to embed a player at O'Reilly and used that on the website for users to play the files. Great fun! When I was a little girl there was this stuff called reel-to-reel tape to record voice. The tapes in my dad's stereo were the size of a dinner plate! My how times have changed.

I had an experience in class this week that I thought a lot about on the drive home. We were having one of our lively discussions in Ped II, and Elaine our instructor, said something about having the ability to sense where people were at and how they were doing. I asked her how I was doing and everyone laughed as it may have appeared to be a snarky comment on my part. But it was not meant in that way. I truly wanted to hear my teacher’s voice…not the like in these two audio projects I made for Web II, but her inner voice and thoughts on the material we were covering.

So I thought about what modern theorists said about the role of a teacher in the classroom. Dewey said teachers should have the knowledge and ability to guide students through a very learner-centered process. The teacher’s role was to create authentic learning experiences. Piaget believed that knowledge was not just imparted orally, but that it is constructed and reconstructed by students. Vygotsky believed that teachers and students were collaborating in an effort at making meaning. Are all of these theorists building on the same sort of principles? What was coming up in the reading about teaching in the new electronic age?

In “A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning” L. Dee Fink speaks of active learning which is described as involving students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. I remember reading “The Virtual Student” last year. In it Palloff and Pratt suggest that in the learner-centered environment, the instructor is no longer the key content expert…the instructor in an online class moves to the side and allows student expertise to emerge. Wow, that is a shift in the whole paradigm of information delivery! And truthfully, this shift demands more of the teacher. In “What the Best College Teachers Do,” Ken Bain says that he found that effective teachers have something in common. They were learners, constantly trying to improve their own efforts to foster students’ development, and never completely satisfied with what they had already achieved. In other words they were themselves, life-long learners, practicing what they preached. The key is to be flexible and willing to do what the group needs for the learning process. In this way, the students and their learning remain the focus of attention (Palloff & Pratt, 127). A teacher can not just rest on their laurels. Tomlinson & McTighe in fact tell us that: Professionals in any field are distinguished by two characteristics: (1) They act on the most current knowledge that defines the field, and (2) they are client centered and adapt to meet the needs of individuals (11).

All of the above is brought together beautifully in a quote from Kinetic connections: Bloom’s taxonomy in action - Teachers scaffold learning so that students can assume a more active role in their own learning. This means that lessons are in fact more carefully constructed to guide students through the exploration of content. Teachers’ instructional arsenal contains a greater variety of instructional techniques and knowledge of instructional design. Their role has evolved from the limited didactic form of lecturing once held as the standard view of an effective teacher. And while I can intellectually understand these concepts, I still have the nagging question – where do I hear what the instructor thinks of the material?