The Edible Schoolyard and A Night in the Global Village

The Edible Schoolyard and A Night in the Global Village are both videos that you may watch in iTunes U. These were found in the Edutopia section. These titles were created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation and they are part of a What Works in Public Education series. Edutopia was created to show and share learning environments that promote innovation and interactive learning. They have shared this in a magazine, a website, and videos.

The Edible Schoolyard is a video about Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, CA. The Edible Schoolyard was created to help improve school lunch programs in 1994 and now it has become a great learning tool for the students at this school. They use this outdoor classroom to teach students math, social studies, and science while getting the students to work together and communicate. This has been a great program to teach students where our food comes from and many other things that may help them in the future. They use the garden and kitchen lab for teaching life lessons and tasting the things they grow. In my opinion this is a very successful experiment that would be great for any school to have.

A Night in the Global Village is a video about Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas. This foundation has five acres and offers a hands-on campus to educate the world about poverty, hunger, and possible solutions. The program allows individuals to visit for a two-hour tour or up to a week long camp that they created to allow them to see and experience how people live in poverty. They have created homes that imitate those in Thailand, Guatemala, Zambia, Appalachia (urban slums), and refugees. The video shows Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning attending for one night and how they handle not having food, water, fire, or even being able to communicate with any language skills. They draw numbers to determine where they will spend their night at the Village and what materials they will start with. It shows a little about how the students struggle and the problems they may face if they were in this situation. I think it was created to show young people in a very fortunate world how things are for many other people around the world. I think this program is very powerful and probably enlightens many young minds about the people that need help.

I think that these podcasts are a great way to help teachers learn about how to promote innovation. Hopefully, these videos will inspire teachers. It made me think about how other teachers and schools use hands on activities in their schools and about how important this is for students. I think that it a great way to show teachers that things like The Edible Schoolyard are possible. It may mean more time and effort, but they are worth it.

I also think that the video about A Night in the Global Village is a great way to share an experience with students in a classroom that may not be able to visit the actual ranch or place like this. It is wonderful that you can share these things through a podcast and allow your students to see what takes place. It may not be as powerful as if they had the experience themselves, but it can be very inspiring to see what students their age are doing. I think that this video in particular is very informational and would be a great addition to a classroom lesson.

These were great examples of how powerful and useful podcasts can be in K-12 classroom. They have many great podcasts available for free in iTunes U. People put so much time and effort into these programs and videos and it is a great tool for teachers and students.

iTunes University

I was very impressed by how much information you can find at iTunes University. I thought you would probably be able to find some podcasts from University classrooms online, but this was much more than I expected. I was also surprised that so many well-known schools participate. Many schools had great lectures and short speeches that were very easy to access.

When I visited the iTunes U, I found out that iTunes has the largest collection of free educational media for anyone to use. They have over 100,000 audio and video files available. A few of the colleges that participate are Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Oxford, Texas A&M, and many more. I thought that it was great that they have it set up where schools can choose if they want to share information with only students, everyone, or only certain files that require usernames and passwords.

I looked at Carnegie Mellon's available podcasts and videos and they have so much available. They have videos of Randy Pausch's lectures, information for prospective students, information about the different departments, and they even have videos of the presidential campaign visits. I think that it is great to have so many videos and podcasts available for people that are attending the college or just interested in certain things about the college. I believe that all colleges should participate in this great program that is available.

Another impressive part of iTunes U was that they also have audios and videos for K-12 schools. I looked at several of the videos from the WBGH teachers' domain and believe that I could use this in an elementary classroom. I think that students will enjoy watching most of the ones that I watched were very short, but informational. I think that I would be able to use these for the classroom as a group or for individuals. The group of files from Edutopia are more for teachers. It gives information and examples of things that teachers may want to do in their classrooms.