On this podcast Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison are joined by John Concilus, Director of Educational Technology, and a student from one of the schools in the Bering Strait School District. John introduced himself a few weeks ago by responding to an earlier podcast with a "Comment and Invitation for Collaboration."

Learn more about the Bering Strait School District and their work with technology. Then this Wednesday, April 30, join John Concilus again, plus a teacher from Brevig Mission, AK, Ginger Crockett, and others. Woody Woodgate and a colleague may be joining us as well. (Maybe we'll finally find out more about that seal hunt.)

We are excited to continue our connections with teachers in Alaska, and in particular we want to learn more about "place-based education." Here's what John said in a recent email:

We've already decided at the budget meeting to move forward with our Digital Foxfire program next school year. I'll have more information about this by Wednesday, but will have a form set up by then for having potentially intersted partner schools sign up.

http://edtechtalk.com/node/3148

Just before the second issue of Space was published, Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison, from the New York City Writing Project, were joined by:

• Kevin Hodgson, a sixth grade teacher from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project
• George Mayo, an 8th grade teacher from Maryland, and one of his students Pablo, an editor of the second issue of Space.
• Chris Sloan, a high school teacher from the Wasatch Range Writing Project in Salt Lake City, and one of his students, Dane
• Hannah, a student from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia

Join the fun!

1. Listen to this podcast, as we bounce ideas off each other and plan future collaborations.
2. Please share Space, Issue #2 with your students.
3. And register your students at Youth Twitter.

2008space - via kwout

Chat Log

http://edtechtalk.com/node/3135

For this webcast, we invited Bill Fitzgerald, Dave Cormier and Gail Desler to talk about social networking and what platforms make sense right now. Of course behind all of this talk about Drupal and Edublogs were questions that we are asking about about how we in the, ah... Teachers Teaching Teachers, Youth Voices, Personal Learning Space, Youth Twitter ... group of teachers might want to continue working together ... and how the software decisions we need to make this Spring can support our hopes and plans.

Earlier this month, on Youth Twitter, a student in South Korea, Soojin wrote, "just my opinion about youthtwitter: schooly. concrete."

A bit later, Hannah, a student in Philadelphia, answered on Youth Twitter, "I think Alan's survey is a good example of how not to be 'schooly'. Students should ask questions of each other and interact."

Wow, we thought this would be an interesting conversation on Teachers Teaching Teachers. Perhaps we could have more of a Students Teaching Teachers show.

We invited Soojin, Hannah, Alan, a student from Queens, NY, Lindsea, a studnet from Honolulu, and Ben, a student from NYC to talk about the possibilities and problems with http://youthtwitter on our live webcast, Teachers Teaching Teachers.

What a great a conversation we had about Youth Twitter, and blogging, and social networking and blogging-beyond-school.

OH! We also invited some of the students' teachers. Their insights were invaluable.

We were excited to have Clay Burell, Madeline Brownstone, and George Mayo join us for this conversation as well.

Here's the first paragraph of a blog post that Soojin wrote the day after the webcast. (Click the link to read the whole post, and the responses.)

Enjoy! And pass this podcast on to your students for inspiration.

20:44:18 tkidd132: Tyrone has Arrived To the Chat....
20:44:56 paulallison: Hi Tyrone... just getting set up. Hi Bill.
20:45:05 paulallison: http://students2oh.org/
20:45:06 Bill O'Neal: Hi Paul
20:45:11 paulallison: http://nycstudents.blogspot.com/
20:45:18 paulallison: http://lindseak.wordpress.com/
20:45:28 tkidd132: thats good....
20:45:57 tkidd132: Student2.o i love there blog...
20:46:13 tkidd132: Is Arthus going to be on tonight Mr Allison

This podcast begins with a focus on the work of two technology teachers and two students from The Baccalaureate School for Global Education (BSGE) in Astoria, NY. Madeline Brownstone and Shantanu Saha describe their two-year technology curriculum that has students doing global, multimedia projects.

Madeline and Shantanu have been working with schools here in the US through the New York City Writing Project and World Bridges/EdTechTalk. And their students have been participating in a project with a school in the Netherlands with iEarn.

More recently their students have also begun working with teachers and students involved with the Horizon Project, which was founded by Vikki Davis and Julie Lindsay. Listen to hear how these teachers and students integrate these national and international projects with the curricular expectations of a technology concentration that leads to an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma.

That might be enough, but Madeline and Shantanu and their students also found wonderful ways to relate their work to the collaborative study of rural culture that is being planned by Lee Baber in Virginia and Woody Woodgate in Alaska. Woody tells his students that they are natives of Alaska and the digital worlds.

In this podcast we explore all of these ways of connecting urban, rural, global, and digital youths!

http://edtechtalk.com/node/3090

This spring Susan Ettenheim and Paul Allison are experimenting again. This time with Hypertextopia. We have just begun to explore with our students how writing changes in this online environment. To learn more, we invited Mark Bernstein and Jeremy Ashkenas to have a conversation with us.

• Mark Bernstein has been Eastgate's chief scientist since 1987. He has developed Storyspace and other hypertext software, and he is the publisher of wonderful hypertexts.
• Jeremy Ashkenas is working on Hypertextopia as a part of his final project for his undergraduate degree at Brown University.

We were inspired to invite the spunky programmer/publisher to talk with the upstart literature/computer undergrad after reading through this recent thread on if:Book. Listen to learn more about hypertext writing online, and join us at Hypertextopia!

Chat Log

http://edtechtalk.com/node/3082 

It's happening in small, geographically dispersed schools in rural Alaska. Three people are responsible for doing it for over a million public school students in New York City. An independent school in Milwaukee uses the same software that is being used in NYC to do it. In Colorado, an outspoken opponent of it was recently hired for a district level job, and now he is on a small committee that gives the thumbs up or down. In North Dakota, a secret password is emailed each week to a group of thirty teachers who can then undo it in their schools, when needed. In rural Virginia, a teacher carefully measures her arguments for the educational benefit against the possible risks each time she requests for it to be undone. Because so many schools do it in so many different ways, the developers of VoiceThread have to work overtime to keep their Web 2.0 tool available in public schools.

In September, Wesley Fryer "observed from China that the level of content filtering / censorship enforced by the central, totalitarian government was actually LESS severe than the content filtering enforced in many U.S. public schools" (Content filtering in Communist China versus an Oklahoma school » Moving at the Speed of Creativity).

Really? Do the descriptions in the first paragraph accurately represent the tyranny of filtering in U.S. schools today? Or do teachers have more power than we often exercise? It's become too easy for educators to represent filtering as if it's something that oppresses us. What if we find that the enemy is us?

From the discussion captured on this podcast, we can sketch a much more complicated picture of how filtering really seems to work in U.S. schools. See what we mean by clicking Read more, below.

Recently, Lee Baber and Elderbob Brannan facilitated a 6-week session for the Electronic Village Online. I Got Rhythm: Music in the Classroom.

One of the prizes they found during their class was Joseph M. Pisano, a music professor whose enthusasiam and knowledge bubbles out in this podcast!

Listen to Dr. Pisano, then pass this one on to the music educator in your school. Also check out his blog: MusTech.net

That's not all! Hook your favorite music educator up with Dr. Pisano's campaign, Me Blogger. His goal is to inspire 100 Music Education Bloggers (ME Too!) before 2009. He would like to invite any music educator to become a ME Blogger today. "Join Our “Global Conversation” about music, education, and technology!"

Chat Log

(Click Read more to see more about Lee Baber and Elderbob Brannan)

Teachers Teaching Teachers #93 - 02.27.08

Imagine, if you would, your department meeting webcast live every month or so. At it's core, that's what we aim for at Teachers Teaching Teachers, and there's more. In this podcast, we go back to the basics, back to the making public our private curriculum discussions. Five National Writing Project teachers and two guests joined together to check what our students were doing and what we were thinking. We work together with a group of sites:

• Youth Voices social network of 9th - 12 grade bloggers
• Personal Learning Space - social network of 6th - 8th grade bloggers
• Elggplans Wikispace - a wiki where we gather collaborative plans
• Youthwiki Wikispace- a wiki for youths to share multimedia in galleries of work
• Youth Bridges - youth podcasting network
• Youth Twitter - a safe, twitter-like blogging network for students

• 10 self 10 world questions
• 12 steps to a post with image, comments, and reflection
• Be a blogger - Self Assessment Guide
• Be a blogger! - Hypertext version

• Chris Sloan, Salt Lake City, Utah
• Bill O'Neal, Trenton, New Jersey
• Lynne Culp, Los Angeles, California
• Mike Sansone, Iowa
• Jim Sigler, Missouri

Listen to this podcast of 8th grade students from Maryland and Virginia talking about Darfur.

Then go to Many Voices for Darfur with you students and have them add their thoughts.

Thursday and Friday, March 6 and 7, 2008

Many Voices for Darfur

20:36:34 NCavillones - hey, susan
20:36:46 SusanEttenheim - hi!
20:36:59 SusanEttenheim - getting ready then running off for a few minutes... how are you?
20:37:04 NCavillones - early , eh?
20:37:06 NCavillones - im good
20:37:14 NCavillones - been having fun with http://my.nycwp.net this week
20:37:21 NCavillones - i meant to email you about volunteering

This is a jam-packed thirty-nine minutes, where we explore the power of tagging, teachers using tumblogs, mathcasts, VoiceThreads in health, speech, history, math, music, technology, and EFL classes. Join Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Susan Ettenheim, and VoiceThread's Ben Papell (Yes, he's a "regular" by now), as they welcome these fresh voices, fresh at least to us at Teachers Teaching Teachers:

• Carla Raguseo, an EFL teacher and Computer Lab coordinator at A.R.I.C.A.N.A., a Binational Center in Rosario, Argentina
• Carla Arena, a Brazilian EFL teacher, teacher trainer and site content manager at A Binational Center in Brasilia, but she's on a leave right now.
• Jeremy Brown, a Special Education Teacher at the Medow Hall Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland
• Judi Epcke, a teacher and Technology Integration Specialist in Northbrook, Illinois
• Tim Fahlberg, founder of Mathcasts, after 11 years as a math teacher.

Some educators, including some of us who meet regularly on Teachers Teaching Teachers, have begun to find places in our curriculum for microblogging.

“Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need for an even faster mode of communication. By encouraging shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and thought investment for content generation. This is also one of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general. The second important difference is the frequency of update. On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day.” (Java Akshay, Tim Finin, Xaiodan Song, Bell Tseng, Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites. August 12, 2007)

Ellen Petry Leanse has a powerful story to tell of her escape from the political unrest in Kenya during the presidential elections over the 2007 Christmas holidays. She and her 12 year old son were there volunteering in an orphanage as well as other humanitarian work. I first encountered her story January 15th on Guy Kawasaki’s blog as a guest post. Her writing moved me. Something inside of me kept saying to contact her and help her share what she and her son went through. As Google would have it, her email came up in the first try, and by 8:11 AM I sent off a personal plea to her to share her narrative through digital storytelling.

A Piece of My Mind - my ideas, thoughts, experiences, and lessons learned in education The founders of VoiceThread, Ben Papell and Steve Muth, also join us in this discussion of the lessons that can be learned from this one example of digital storytelling.

Listen to seven National Writing Project teachers plan a Spring Blogging curriculum together.

Find out if seven people can plan a curriculum together over skype. These seven teachers from Writing Projects across the country met and planned a 15-week blogging curriculum that they have started to put together (click read more).

• Bob Levin and Gail Desler (Area 3 Writing Project, Sacramento, CA)
• Woody Woodgate (Alaska Writing Project, Marshall, Alaska)
• Bill O'Neal (Trenton, NJ Writing Project)
• Chris Sloan (Wasatch Range Writing Project, Salt Lake City, Utah)
• Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim (New York City Writing Project)