Teachers Teaching Teachers #98 - Learning to be Unschooly - 04.02.08

Paul Allison — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:57:35 -0500

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.

Unschooly-Youths Conversations Reflection

Posted on April 4th, 2008 by Soojin

April 3^rd, 2008 10:00 AM GMT+09, something new happened to my life. Well, yes to quote me that was my “first time Skyping for real-purposes” and, of course, “with bunch of White-people” that lasted more than an hour hosted by a group called TeachersTeachingTeachers (not to forget mentioning Clay Burell’s impression that it was more like StudentsTeachingTeachers :-). Many feelings crossed my heart. Oh well, yes, I was pretty nervous at first I won’t deny (so childish!). And at the same time I was very honored to join this group of 9 out of 6 billion, members consisting of Clay Burell, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim, Madeline Brownstone, Lindsea, Hannah, Alan, Mr.Mayo, and Ben, talking about the leading form of education that all world will eventually have (sorry that I couldn’t link all names; please tell me your addresses). Paul told me during the conference that my tweet in YouthTwitter: just my opinion about youthtwitter: schooly. concrete was one of the key inspiration for opening such meeting. Actually, when I decided to tweet that I was afraid if I offended anyone in YouthTwitter but I decided to become honest because I wanted YT to improve. I’ve been blogging since last year, connected since about a month ago, and now I made a difference. Very meaningful.

No Music No Civilization » Unschooly-Youths Conversations Reflection

Chat Log (Don't miss this one.)

Image by Lindsea

Teachers Teaching Teachers #97 - Foxfire for the Firefox Generation - 03.26.08

Paul Allison — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:04:35 -0500

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!