Enjoy this podcast, recorded 10 days ago, getting ready for ISTE. What are you looking for there? What are you bringing?
Click Read more to see Christina Cantrill's personal list of some of the events where National Writing Project (WP) teachers will be participating as well as the chat that was happening during this webcast.
58:50 minutes (13.47 MB)
The day after this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, Chris Sloan, a frequent co-host and planner on the show this year, wrote to Susan and Paul: “I have to say that last night's TTT was an inspiration. It's really got me re-evaluating my teaching.”
The focus of this week’s episode was on social start-ups. Suzie Boss helped us decide who to invite to a show where we were asking to better understand social entrepreneurship. One of the projects that Suzie thought we would want to know about is Cool School Challenge, which, in her description is:
an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of schools. It was launched by Mike Town,
environmental science teacher at Redmond High School in Washington, and partners with Puget Sound Clean Air Agency. Participating schools set CO2 reduction goals, figure out their own strategies to achieve them, and track results (and $$ savings for schools) on their website: www.coolschoolchallenge.org
We caught up with Mike Town while he was traveling. Mike currently lives in Washington DC on a year-long Einstein fellowship with the National Science Foundation, and will return to teaching next year. We ask Mike specific questions about Cool School Challenge, but we also ask him to help us to think about the whole idea of working with students to learn about how social justice issues and entrepreneurship can go together.
Bill Ferriter (One Tweet CAN Change the World) was another able guide in our inquiry on this episode of TTT. We talk to him about his micro-loans club of which he and his students are pretty excited:
One of the projects that I've begun to engage my students in is studying the world through microloans that we are making through Kiva. We've spent the better part of the past 8 months raising money, studying countries, and selecting entrepreneurs that we are willing to
support with loans ranging anywhere from $25-$100. We've even created a Lending Team---called Team Kids Care---designed to encourage other classes to join us in our efforts. (See more on his Microloans wiki page on Digitally Speaking.)
Another social entrepreneur on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers was our colleague from New Orleans, Kyle Meador, who is the Director of Educational Programs at Our School at Blair Grocery. Their "About OSBG" page on their web site summarizes some of the work that Kyle does with Nat Turner (5 Years After Katrina, Teacher Tills Soil of Lower 9th Ward) and others in the Lower Ninth Ward:
Our mission is to create a resource-rich safe space for youth empowerment and sustainable community development.
Currently, we:
Employ 10 neighborhood teenagers in our Growing Growers program,
Operate as the Gulf Coast Growing Power Regional Outreach Training Center,
Operate a Community Supported Agriculture-style market (Our Market)
and a restaurant sales business generating an average of $1,500 weekly
from 1/3 acre of land with our students,
Engage and educate over 700 high school and college service-learners annually, and
Operate an independent alternative school with 5 total students
For listeners who want some background about social entrepreneurship,
Suzie Boss provides a couple of a couple of introductory links:
The
New Heroes is a PBS documentary series (now a few years old) that
profiles social entrepreneurs from around the world. (Full disclosure:
Suzie helped write the classroom materials). Details here:
www.pbs.org/thenewheroes
Youth Venture is the sister organization Ashoka, which has been kind of the mother-ship for nurturing social entrepreneurs worldwide. Youth Venture aims to get teens (and younger students) involved in leading their own sustainable solutions, and offers start-up grants to teams that come up with good ideas: http://www.genv.net/
We hope you too will find inspiration and encouragement from these beacons of social vision and business sense that we were able to have on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
When the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, teachers across the country recognized an opportunity to bring real-world applications of math and science into their classrooms. Similarly, the rescue of 33 Chilean miners has triggered student discussions about everything from heroism to human biology.
In the wake of such dramatic events, some teachers are eager to do more than host current-events-style conversations. They want to use the news as a launching pad for in-depth student learning. But making that happen requires teachers and students to dive into topics for which there are no texts or guidebooks. What’s more, maintaining student interest can be challenging once the headlines start to fade and media attention shifts to tomorrow’s hot topic.
How do you plan for academically rigorous projects that are “ripped from the headlines”? Here are a few suggestions, along with some timely resources.
Kyle Meador, the Director of Education at Our School at Blair Grocery, New Orleans. To learn more about Our School at Blair Grocery, check out this video. Then click here to visit their photo slideshow. This is well worth your time! And while you are there, please contribute to their construction efforts. You'll find a donate button on the right side of the site.
We met Kyle on Edutopia’s “official PBL Camp kickoff” this Monday. This was a webinar led by Suzie Boss, and it was “attended by more than 100 campers. If you missed the live event, you can view an archived recording, and/or download the slide presentation.” Suzie also joins us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teacher. There was a lot of synergy between Edutopia’s Problem-Based Learning Camp and our webcast this summer. It was great to be a small part of this work. All of of the materials of this camp areopen to everybody and there is PBL wiki.
On this episode, we also welcome two teachers from the Live Oak Writing Project which is on the coast in Mississippi. High school science teacher, Alicia Blair who had been with us the week before returns with a colleague,Stacey Ferguson who teaches 5th grade.
Middle-school science and technology teacher, Jeff Mason joins us once again to give us his perspectives from Pensacola, Florida.
On this show, we talk about getting a website ready in time for the students on the Gulf Coast, to make it easy for them to share their stories, poems, photographs, essays, and cartoons with us. Bill Fitzgerald and his colleagues at FunnyMonkey pulled it off! Students are coming back along the Gulf Coast this week and next week. "Voices on the Gulf" is ready. We expect that student voices will dominate on this site eventually, but we invite you to join now, and add a discussion. What are you thinking about the BP oil spill? How will this event change your teaching?
Please plan to join us to plan curriculum and make connections with teachers in the Gulf. Browse over to http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA every Wednesday in August./ World Times. We’ll see you then!
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
an amazing young high school student who has developed his own project-based learning by creating info-graphics.
a dynamic teacher who has been working all year to help open a new public school in East Brooklyn.
We learned a lot, both about visualizing information and about integrating technology into a new, alternative school.
Michael, Amazing Student
Chris Sloan joined us with one of his amazing students, Michael, from Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City. Michael has a blog called Graph the Info.
Click on this image to see a recent post where Michael explains his creative process:
East Brooklyn Community High School is a small, academically rigorous high school that is committed to preparing students for college, meaningful employment, healthy personal and family relationships and participation in the life of their communities. East Brooklyn Community High School is a transfer school that is designed to help students who have fallen behind in credit accumulation get back on track and earn a high school diploma. East Brooklyn Community HS is a collaboration between the DOE and SCO Family Services; our curriculum and programs build on SCO’s comprehensive range of neighborhood and community based services that sustain families and children. The academic program will utilize innovative and project based instructional strategies that prepare students to pass Regents exams and develop the skills needed for post secondary options.
We hope you enjoy this podcast, and that you will join us each Wednesday this summer as we develop curriculum together that will address the BP Gulf Oil Atrocity.
Click Read more to see a copy of the chat that was happening during the webcast.
We've been learning about gaming from students this spring, and on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers we were joined by two ninth graders from Susan Ettenheim's class in NYC, a tenth grader from Paul Allison's class in Queens, an eleventh grader from Austin, Texas, and a senior from Chris Sloan's class in Salt Lake City.
We learned so much about gaming from Jake a few weeks ago (TTT #190) and Robin more recently (TTT #192) that we invited both of them back to talk more specifically about Alternate Reality Games and Evoke! On this episode, you'll hear Jake and Robin, and a few other students talk about their experience of playing Evoke!
Is Evoke a game? Or is it just a trick to get people to use a social network? Why do serious gamers seem to know what Jane McGonigal is up to (See recent TED talk.), and get engaged with this game, while other students are less engaged? We invite you to join us as we listen to our students and our colleagues respond to these questions.
Jake is a senior in Chris Sloan's New Media class at Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Robin is a sophomore in Paul Allison's English class at the East-West School of International Studies in Flushing, NYC.
Perez and Phil are freshman in Susan Ettenheim's class at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, in New York City.
Nathan is a junior and he's a game-runner for Evoke from Austin, Texas.
Recently the group of teachers whose students are using Youth Voices have been paying more attention to both the gamers in our classrooms and to the educational leaders who are suggesting that we consider bringing gaming into the curriculum. We are looking for ideas, answer to our questions and inspiration from students like Jake and critical friends like Suzie Boss, both of whom join us on this episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers.
Jake is a senior in Chris Sloan's New Media class at Judge Memorial High School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The invitation that we sent for this episode remains an open one. We would love to hear how you and your students are bringing the world of gaming into your teaching and learning!
If you’re a student who plays games or a game designer or a teacher who resents that he doesn’t have more time to play games... If you use games in your classroom or would like to... If you want to learn more about gaming in education—like we do.... then please join us for more talk about what we’re learning about gaming! Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times. We’re looking for more students and teachers to join us in this quest to include games in our classrooms.
Also, we would like to take a moment to say how important it has been for us to learn about the work of others at conferences this year. This episode of Teachers Teaching Teachers, which was produced and edited by Chris Sloan, and much of the innovative curriculum work that we are doing in our classrooms this spring probably would not have happened without the important work of Christina Cantrill, Paul Oh, and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl and others at the National Writing Project.
They introduced us to the work of Barry Joseph and Rafi Santo from Global Kids at the Digital Is conference, a one-day conference supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative in November 2009. And they've been nurturing our connections ever since.
Also, we owe thanks to Chris Lehmann and the teachers and students of the Science Leadership Academy for bringing us together with Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss at Educon 2.2 in January 2010. Suzie's suggestion that we take a look at Evoke helped up us find a rich gaming path to follow this spring! It's worth remembering that a lot of exciting teaching and learning can come from following up on those business cards that we exchange at conferences.
Other related Teachers Teaching Teachers episodes:
For this podcast, we invited five New York City educators who, at the time, were in the middle of a 3-week Summer Institute with the New York City Writing Project. Paul Allison and Shantanu Saha were the facilitators for this Institute in which participants were invited to:
Spend 12 days this summer with other New York City Writing Project teachers who use technology in their classrooms. Share the ways we use the Internet to make student-to-student connections. Learn about a curriculum currently being developed and collaborated on by teachers across the nation. Explore how we use blogs, wikis, images, videos, podcasts, and other tools to inspire young people to do research into their own questions.
These are five of the teachers who joined us:
Charlie Freij, Technology/English Teacher, East Brooklyn Community High School
Doug Condon, Art Teacher, Academy of American Studies in Queens
Julio Benitez, English Teacher, High School for Construction Trades, Engineering, and Architecture, Queens
Karen Levy, Library Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Bronx
Michael Dodes, Library Media Specialist, samuel Gompers Career/Technonogy Ed High School, Bronx
We also had a wonderful surprise guest, Suzie Boss. Just before going live with this webcast (that is recorded here as a podcast), Paul noticed that Suzie Boss was online in Skype. Since we had been talking about her book earlier in the day, Paul took a chance and invited Suzie to join them. What an thoughful, supportive, informed guest she was!
And that's not all. We were also joined by Mike from Central Texas. He's been teaching for 40 years, using inquiry, Great Books Discussions, and the New Jersey Writing Project (in Texas) as his touchstones, and recently he has been exploring Web 2.0 tools. This was his first skype call.
How wonderful it was to add these names to our list of guests:
Do you have your EdTechTalk stuff yet? Did you know there are T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, buttons, magnets, and tote bags available? They're all based on Wordle interpretations of the EdTechTalk Delicious tags.
What are you waiting for? These are limited edition items. Shop now and avoid the rush!
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