Bigger Classroom/Gabcast Assignment

Hi everyone:
I had my College Writing I students call in their essay topics to my Gabcast channel last week as prewriting for their first essay on "Received Ideas." I think it worked okay. It's a small sample: there are only 9 students enrolled in the class, and 8 completed the task by the due date. Later on, maybe after the students have written the first two essays, I'll do a survey and get their feedback on whether they found the phone-in useful.
I found collecting the messages and burning them to a CD to play in class pretty easy. One of my concerns had been sound quality, but only two messages were two messages sounded a little wonky, and even with those, I could understand what was being said on a second listen. With a small number of students, and it being early in the semester without a lot of papers to grade, it wasn't too difficult to transfer the phone messages from my Gabcast channel to the Bigger Classroom blog, but I can anticipate that this might not always be the case.
So the technology worked fine, and I'm still evaluating the pedagogical value.
This is a link to the post on my Bigger Classroom blog with student phone messages:
http://biggerclassroom.blogspot.com/2007/09/received-ideas-phone-messages.html
Tracy

Into The Wild Blog Update

I really don't have much to update you all on. My first assignment is not due until the beginning of October so once the students submit that I will have an update as to how it went. I explained to them the assignment on the first day of class and could tell from some of their reactions that creating a blog and using it as an online journal written as a character in a book is an assignment that is different for them, which for me is good. One update I can share with you is that I took what we learned at Calderwood and designed an academic blog. One of the things I struggle with is students taking proper notes and making sure they understand and go back and review the important aspects of class discussions/lectures. So I took what we learned at Calderwood and I started an academic blog that chronicles what went on in class, the discussion topics, things to focus on for next class, main points to study for quizzes/exams, homework assignments, etc. This blog stemmed from my own struggle to keep my semesters straight when I am teaching 4 classes or multiple sections and things can get hectic. Immediately after class I would write a paragraph to myself that summed up class and reminded me what to focus on next class. I realized that if I am struggling to keep things straight, maybe the students are too. I chose to do this in blog format because you can be more creative and more informal which seems to be more inviting to students, unlike how they perceive platforms like WebCT, Blackboard, etc. Here is the link. http://profdetjen.blogspot.com