Frustrating and Exciting!

There are so many things I should be doing at this moment, but needed to share this with all of you!! We have been working on uploading our podcasts to our blogs. Such a simple sounding task I know; but as always with technology there have been glitches. I am continually telling my students I am learning right along with them; hence the name of my blog, but today was able to model that for them. Students discovered our media player was displaying their first and last names; something we discourage for our 7th graders. I didn’t have the solution, so asked my entire class to stop what they were doing at that moment and search the “Tindeck” site for answers. I also shot off a quick email to Tindeck asking for advice. Jenn timidly raised her hand and shared her discovery. We could edit our tracks and change the name of the artist, thus solving our problem. Much to my surprise, I received an almost immediate response from Tindeck, who unknowing to me is based in Australia. They didn’t have the resolve, but were willing to see if they could go in to accounts and make corrections to user names. I replied with the student resolve. Thinking that would be the end of my communication with Tindeck, I didn’t pay much attention to my email. Well, I was wrong. That was not the end of my communication. Tindeck was interested in how we were using their site (this is actually when I found out they were located in Australia). So what started off as a very frustrating lesson, turned in to one of the better and more exciting couple of classes I’ve had in a long time.
It is interesting how quickly the world becomes so small and connected. Just one of life’s great “teachable moments”!!!